


Mad Season

by imperialhuxness



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (and being sick is no excuse), (no blood), Anal Fingering, Biting, Force Decay, Knifeplay, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Nipple Play, Oral Sex, Pining, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Service Top, Supernatural Illnesses, The Dark Side of the Force, Top Armitage Hux, masked sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2020-07-23 03:40:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20001736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhuxness/pseuds/imperialhuxness
Summary: An unexpectedly intense mission exacerbates Supreme Leader Kylo Ren's ongoing Force decay.Hux is--among other things--a welcome distraction.





	1. Chapter 1

Head pounding, Kylo surveys the patch of scorched earth that used to comprise the enemy line. Whatever it was he just summoned--fire or lightning, he still isn't sure, _some_ combustible formula of charged atmospheric particles--it was effective, at least. 

Where twenty intractable paramilitary operatives have been holding out the local Resistance's furthest outpost in the valley, only a massive black scuff remains, like a patch of igneous rock amid the bland gray of dead ground and towering boulders. 

It doesn’t mark much progress, but Force knows the Order needs it. They need anything they can get at this point. Two standard weeks into the operation, and they’re no closer to taking Qusuf IX's dedlanite mines than when they started. 

Just being here is a little worse every day, and it doesn’t help that the planet’s sun is permanently obscured by heavy clouds, high in its atmosphere. It’s Dark here, too, which helps with a mass-casualty action like the one he just executed, but is draining, in its way--drawing off of an external source. 

It hurts, though it shouldn’t, because he’s weak and unstable and everything every master always told him was holding him back.

(Because _it_ is already spreading under his mask, all pins and needles on the right side of his face, the throb of overworked veins. It wants him, as always. It wants him, it's trying to--

"Supreme Leader?"

The captain's voice tears Kylo's gaze from the scorched earth. Their mask is a palette of battle grime: the blackish residue of plasma fire; the greens, reds, and blues of xeno blood; now, the gray of fresh ash, drifting on the breeze.

"Assemble your men," Kylo says, sensing the request for orders. "And search for casualties. There are two troopers wounded about a quarter kilometer west of here."

The captain, SP-3140, inclines their head, shouts orders to what's left of their battalion. They've been holding the Order's outermost line for the past cycle, and are due a rotation.

They were trained for this too, of course, the kind of warfare where airstrikes are impossible, will destroy the very resource the Order's fighting for--Hux is nothing if not thorough--but it's still wearing on them. A pall of frustration and discouragement hangs over the Order's entire side of the valley, only enhanced by the world's impenetrably thick clouds and the deeper Darkness beyond the Resistance front.

None of that is helping his face right now, the prickling sensation morphing into the familiar chemical burning. He bites his lip, closes his eyes. Doesn't think about it. Any of this.

It'll scab over, like it always does. The skin will peel, and he'll be fine. He deals with it. He deals for a living. Has his whole life.

He keeps his eyes shut, attuning himself to the grayscale Force signatures of the troopers assembling behind him. They're all exhausted. Two of them are hungry. One is lightheaded, weighing whether he should sit down. He thinks he has a broken rib; the minute flare of heat around his heart says he's right.

Kylo's catalogued three of their conditions when the roar of sublight thrusters cuts through his thoughts. He turns, registers that the troopers are more or less fit for transpo, then follows the shadow of a descending _Upsilon_ -class. He crosses the battleground to head up the columns of troopers, at attention several safe and regulation meters from the shuttle's hatch.

Kylo feels the shape of him before the hatch so much as cracks: a spike of energy in the Force where the rest of the valley is pure flatline. He wasn't supposed to come out on today's return flight--not that Kylo meant to check his schedule. (Or ever does.)

But Hux is here, and the spike. Kylo can't tell if it's fear or anger, or just his usual shatterpoint in the Force. The whole thing where he's apparently a pivotal point in the galactic balance, and is bright as all hell, no matter that he's aligned with Kylo (and therefore the Dark).

He's descending the ramp as soon as it touches down, the first replacement squadron filing behind. Kylo lets him come to him, tracks him behind the mask as the troopers begin their handoff procedures. 

The wind teases his greatcoat behind his legs, and he's foregone the officer's cap, in flagrant violation of his own fucking dress code. 

A few flecks of ash have landed in his hair by the time he reaches Kylo. Even close up, his mood isn't readable until he opens his mouth.

"Supreme Leader," he bites off, perfunctory. "What the hell happened here?"

"Victory through power, General.” 

Hux, of course, doesn't recognize the quotation.

“‘Victory through power.’” Hux's gaze strays to the charred ground, then back to Kylo. "'Victory through power,' Supreme Leader, just registered on the seismographs. The geology cell are projecting possible damage to--"

Kylo cuts him off. "How high?"

"What?"

"On the seismographs," Kylo says, slow and pedantic. "How high did it register compared to Jarral?"

Hux looks like he's physically refraining from rolling his eyes. Kylo expected no less.

"Eight point two. Jarral was--"

"Six point six," Kylo supplies. "This is becoming more effective."

Hux bats a flake of ash out of his eyes. "At least our base here is built to withstand it."

The 6.6 on Jarral had collapsed an Imperial-era arsenal on the nearest outpost. Near-total losses on the weapons. Most of them went off, in a fireball that still paled in comparison to Starkiller.

"Would I have done it here if the base weren't?"

Hux purses his lips, looks over Kylo's shoulder to the troops dissembling. He doesn't answer.

"Don't assume I shoot before I think, General."

"Supreme Leader, I've never said--"

"You don't have to say it." 

Hux's jaw tightens, and anger swirls under his skin. He holds Kylo's gaze for a moment, but quickly dips his head. "Will you be returning to base tonight, sir?"

Kylo doesn't hear _sir_ often, but when he does, it's in a tone better suited to _motherfucker_.

He nods his affirmative. He needs to sleep. His face has never been known to heal without it.

"I trust the operation won't collapse if I take a rest cycle."

Hux lifts his gaze slowly, as if tearing it from something at Kylo's side. "I should say not."

Belatedly, Kylo balls his hands to stop their shaking.

#

Kylo is borrowing the late Base Commander Furnis’ office space, a low-ceilinged room like a glorified bunker. Fur rugs line the floors, and two authentic oil paintings decorate the walls: stark gray cliff fronts whose only possible redeeming quality must be that they’re located on Furnis’ homeworld. 

The only furniture is a modest holotank, two high-backed chairs, and the _desk--_ an expansive wooden affair dominating damn near the office’s entire breadth. An atomic chronometer, a decanter of imported whiskey, a pair of tumblers, and a pair of holoframes displaying a rotating slideshow of family stills, decorate the desk. 

Kylo turns the frames on their faces, as he has to at least once a cycle. The cleaning droids just keep standing them back up, unable to take a goddamn hint. His neck and face are still on fire, half-numb, and the last fucking thing he want is a dead man’s domestic counterparts beaming up at the mask.

He can’t take it off, not yet, though the fresh decay will certainly heal faster exposed than stuck with the restored helmet’s shitty ventilation. He’d hardly sat down--hardly put his head in his hands--before he sensed Hux’s presence down the hall, a solar flare in the gloom of the fortress. 

Force knows what he wants. Probably to continue the verbal evisceration he started on the battlefield, which Kylo has exactly zero interest in hearing. He doesn’t need Hux’s voice on top of Snoke’s and Skywalker’s. 

( _“Disappointing lack of control.”)_

( _“Unnecessary use of violence.”)_

_(“Reckless disregard for mission objectives.”)_

The usual bullshit.

He already knows.

Nonetheless, he straightens and lifts a hand to open the doors before Hux can buzz or override himself in. 

“Supreme Leader.” 

Hux is talking before he’s crossed the threshold, and he doesn’t break his stride. He’s shed the greatcoat, and appears to have retouched his pomade. His hair’s all but plastered to the top of his head, like he didn’t have the time for anything more elaborate than simply getting it out of the way. The effect is severe, but not unflattering. (As if anything could be, on him.)

Kylo folds his gloved hands on the desk and ignores the childish urge to flip up the cowl. Hide some more. 

“Did you come to berate me further, General, or did you have something to report?”

Hux pulls out the high-backed chair across the desk from Kylo and sits down without waiting for an invitation. “I’m afraid you may not appreciate the difference.”

Somehow, he’s _patronizing,_ as always. As if Kylo’s lightsaber weren’t at his hip and the Dark weren’t on his side. 

But more importantly, he’s a fucking hypocrite.

Kylo leans back, because that’s what you do when you’re completely in control. “You tend to understand the need for brute force, Starkiller.” 

Hux flinches at the epithet. “Not when the collateral damage includes valuable resources,” he says, then studies the mask like he can see right through it. “I assume you haven’t read the signals report I forwarded you.”

“My datapad is-- out of commission.” _Fried from the explosion_ would only earn him an eyeroll.

Hux ignores him entirely, extracts his own datapad. After a few taps, he shoves it across the desk. 

Kylo skims the report, entitled _Qusuf IX Dedlanite Miner Confirms Collapse of Two Viable Shafts Following Seismic Event._ The text goes on to confirm that the shafts, located in the mine’s newly-probed southern half, have fallen in. The intercepted workers also discussed four casualties and the irreparable condition of caves containing a bonanza of ore. 

Good thing Kylo’s wearing the mask, because by the time he reaches the end of the report, he’s dug his teeth into his lower lip and tastes copper. This is all his fault. The whole mission’s going to be a waste because he’s too fucking weak to manage the Darkness that’s here, rather than let it control him; because he’s reckless and an idiot and impulsive. 

(Because he’s Ben fucking Solo shouting glasses off of tables and bolts out of blasters. Ben fucking Solo, monster at fifteen. Ben fucking Solo, worthless, useless, and apparently immortal. Ben fucking--

“Supreme Leader.”

"Yes, General?”

Hux purses his lips like he's holding back a theatrical sigh. His gaze strays to Furnis' decanter, less discreetly than he thinks. He starts, but Kylo cuts him off, sliding the datapad back across the desk. 

"Did they pass anything new about the mine's layout? There are still too many gaps in our schematic."

"No," Hux says. Back to the decanter. He's radiating tension and fatigue all at once, and it's burrowing under Kylo's skin. "I commed the analysts personally. They reported everything that was in the call."

Kylo telegraphs Hux's gaze to the whiskey. "Too bad," he says, and turns over a single tumbler. He lifts the decanter and uncaps it, pours one finger, then a second. Hux won't drink it, but he needs to know he can have it. "They're going to keep monitoring that target?" He passes the glass to Hux, dark green liquor sloshing. 

Hux doesn't touch it, hardly spares it a glance. He looks up, immediately holding Kylo's gaze, despite the mask. "Yes, Supreme Leader. They'll keep up the access, but what we need is still an informant. Such as the one that ought to have been captured today."

There's no need to talk about it. Nothing to say. Yeah, Kylo fucked up. Is there anything new to report?

"It was either lose half our battalion or postpone taking prisoners.” Kylo’s voice goes sharp despite his best efforts, and he misses the vocoder. “I would think you'd appreciate my concern."

"I would, if it didn't also mean endangering and destroying the very resource we're here to secure."

So Kylo gets zero points for premeditated action. Not that it matters. 

The whiskey between them has stilled, and Hux refuses to acknowledge it. His hands are curled tightly around the chair’s armrests, a poor substitute for fidgeting. Something darker than mere annoyance simmers in his presence, pressing against the edges of his silhouette; no wonder he’s having to hold himself down.

Kylo could prod it now, but there will be time later, when the lights are low and the mask is off and Hux is giving him anything he asks for. 

But right now, Kylo just needs to dismiss him and his criticisms alike.

"We'll excavate the collapsed tunnels once we're back in control of the mine.” Kylo straightens the decanter, then looks back at Hux. “Nothing's permanently out of reach."

Hux pops his lips. "The sources certainly didn't sound optimistic."

"But they don't have the galaxy's finest engineer at their disposal."

The flattery does its job: catches Hux off-guard. It plays out in the slight pinch of his brows, the parting of his lips, the momentary crinkle of his nose. How his fingers loosen on the armrests. He’s debating whether to make a sarcastic remark about his lengthening job description, or simply accept the compliment.

Kylo doesn’t particularly care which, but he’s impatient. “It’s true,” he says simply, goading.

It still takes Hux a moment to look up, but when he does it’s with a small, mirthless smile and an entitled scoff of laughter. 

“You’d let me bend you over this desk right now.”

“I’d _have you_ bend me over this desk right now, if I wanted that.”

Wanted _you,_ Hux must hear, because his gaze drops to the neglected whiskey, and he straightens his coat cuffs as if they were somehow too short. Exposed him, rather than enveloped.

He says nothing for a moment, but the familiar telltale whistle of an incoming surface-to-air missile cuts off any possible response. His gaze darts--unguardedly anxious--toward the ceiling, and he murmurs _shite_ under his breath.

Kylo makes an effort to relax as he tenses.

Seconds later, the rocket hits the ion shields surrounding the base with a crackle and a buzz that grips the fortress’ foundations. It lingers a few seconds longer than it should, just humming. Kylo feels it behind his eyes, rattling the already-stripped nerves on the right side of his face.

It doesn’t really stop, but he has to get over it. Take the pain, let it propel him. He inches his chair a bit further back and stands. 

“I’ll take out a fresh battalion before oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.” He lights up the holotank on the other side of the office with a thought, then makes for it. Hux, of course, follows. “I’m sure the next rebel force is already crossing the valley.”

“And why,” Hux says, “don’t we let them come?”

Hux’s gaze tracks Kylo’s across the blue-cast topographical outline in front of them. It shows two layers and three dimensions of contested territory: the stark northern mountains, the First Order outpost (a red dot blinking _you are here_ ), and the barren valley between; then the subterranean front--everything the Order knows about the mines’ layout in shy cyan. Much of it is thin air. A southern section has already been updated _Collapsed._

“‘Let them come’?” _Are you fucking kidding me?_ “We’ll make no progress if we aren’t on the offensive, General.”

Hux is at parade rest in Kylo’s periphery, shoulders squared. “Supreme Leader, we’ll make less if we continue to make the same blind attack every day. We need a temporary withdrawal--just long enough to focus on intelligence and develop a plan to invade the mines. Let the rebels wear themselves out while we prepare.”

It would make sense, if things weren’t urgent. If they didn’t need dedlanite every day, if Kylo’s face weren’t burning off, if this planet weren’t so Dark he can hardly think, and he didn’t just want this to be over.

He faces Hux. “If you’re trying to argue that we just sit on our hands for a week or so--”

“I’m not--”

Kylo rolls right over him. “--that sounds like a recipe for a stalemate. The intel teams are doing their job. In the meantime, we’re going to do as much damage to the adversary’s numbers and morale as possible.”

“By continuing to waste lives and ammunition on the battlefield, and quite possibly destroying the mine in the process?”

Kylo has no intention of destroying the fucking mine. Today was a mistake. He was weak. He’ll do better. He’ll get it under control. (He’ll have to.) Hux will see. 

Kylo wraps his fingers around the edge of the table, imagines the metal snapping, frozen brittle under his touch. “Nothing’s going to happen to the mine.”

Hux thins his lips. “And how can I be certain of that? You’ve given me very few reasons to trust your sense of--”

“You don’t have to be certain.” Kylo’s heard enough. “All you have to do is follow orders.”

Hux’s hands fall to his sides at that, the veneer shattered as the dark thing pulses against the shape of him in the Force. He’s armed, as always, and he’s aware of it now: the cool durasteel of the knife up his sleeve, the weight of the blaster under his greatcoat. 

He won’t try anything. He’s aware, too, of the lightsaber, and of invisible hands around his throat. He’s released his fists only to fidget, right index finger scraping idly at right thumb through the leather, but his eyes are arctic blue in the glow of the holotank. He scoffs again, like this is all so hilarious.

“You don’t want my cock, you don’t want my advice...” His gaze falters for a moment, then he meets the mask again. “What the hell am I doing here?”

Kylo grips the table harder. Must strain something in the wiring, because it flickers out. Hux’s eyes return to their usual green, the fine ring of gray around the irises visible again.

And Kylo could explain. He could spell it all out: _Baby, I have no fucking clue if I’m scared of you or just need you close._

_(Baby, I have no fucking clue what you’re doing here.)_

He could bare himself completely without so much as touching the mask. 

He could, sure.

But he doesn’t have to. Not for Hux. Not for anyone. Not anymore.

“Technical expertise.” It rings hollow against the durasteel, so he repeats it: “You’re here for your technical expertise.”

Hux swallows visibly, straightens. Parade rest again. “I could provide technical expertise from my flagship, Supreme Leader.”

“Yes, you could.”

“So why am I not doing so while holding up the chain of command on the _Finalizer_?” Hux drops his hands again, leans in. “Frankly, I trust neither Pryde nor Peavey with it.”

“I find you considerably more troubling.”

Kylo loosens his grip on the tabletop, drums his fingers there, waiting for the inevitable reassurance, wrung from Hux unfairly, maybe, but still a high to hear. It doesn’t come.

“I’m afraid I can’t fix that,” he says, then inclines his head, all practiced deference. All fraud. “If that will be all, Supreme Leader, I’ll--”

“Dismissed,” Kylo says, as if he’d actually summoned Hux, rather than been unable to keep him away. “Get out,” he adds, twenty minutes too late.

Hux’s lips form a thin line, and he doesn’t reply. Just stands up straight, crosses the floor, and pauses next to the desk. Without looking at Kylo, he tips back the neglected whiskey and downs half the glass before setting it back on the desk with a hollow thunk. 

He still says nothing, and Kylo shuts the doors behind him.

The flaying pain in Kylo’s face and neck spikes almost as soon as Hux--ever the distraction--is gone. The helmet feels stifling, too tight, an unbearable weight, volcanic rock encasing his skull. He can’t get it off fast enough.

The hiss of it is muffled by the wail of another missile, then its inevitable disintegration. 

Fuck this. Fuck all of it.

The mask tucked under one arm, he crosses over to the desk, stops on the near side (Hux’s side), and holds up the glass. The chemical lighting shows little more than an impression of Hux’s lips, spit or condensation or maybe some kind of balm he’s wearing against the dry air inside the base.

Kylo doesn’t care. He lines up his own mouth with the imprint and drains the tumbler to the last drop, imported liquor and Armitage Hux’s backwash. It burns down his throat.

#

It isn’t as bad as it feels, Kylo discovers in the ‘fresher, or maybe as it was. 

There’s still the bruise-dark shadow of veins, a vaguely livid tint to the skin on the right side of his face, in perfect contrast to the fading red of the scar. The discoloration is a bit more prevalent down the side of his neck, but easily hidden by his hair. It’s flaking, just a little, premature scabbing. 

Nothing out of the ordinary. 

It still hurts like hell, though. Feels like every nerve under the skin feels is fraying at the root, pulling apart like a string of licorice. The acid bath effect, at least, is somewhat diminished, but the pain is all underneath now, where no salve or ice pack or bacta could get at it.

Kylo braces himself against the vanity with one hand, runs the other through his hair, careful not to tug at the right side of the scalp. It needs washing, as it always does on days when he’s been sweating into the mask for an extended period of time. And the purple shadows under his eyes have nothing to do with the Darkness. (At least not directly.)

When last he checked a chrono, it read well after 2300 hours, and he needs. A sonic, maybe, but he’ll just have the helmet back on again in a few hours. Sleep, but it’s awful here. As good as entering a domain of the Dark.

(He dreamed of one last night. Skywalker and the cave and the reek of the swamp planet. It was so fucking humid, and he was nine and _glad_ to get underground. It was the first time he saw the xeno with the cloven forehead, and Skywalker had told him it wasn’t real.)

(Last night he saw them both. Was them both. The mottled hand held a green lightsaber, and the mask was his own.)

He picks a stray hair off the standard issue soap by the faucet, sopping wet and sticking to the countertop. He flings the hair into the trash can and stares after it blindly, one hand still beside the sink basin. There isn’t much else to straighten up. The cleaning droids are efficient, if nothing else about this planet is.

He needs to sleep. 

He needs to fucking sleep, and he can’t because he’d rather die than leave the ‘fresher, sprawl on the double bed out there, and wait to be haunted.

He can feel his pulse in the right side of his face. Is counting the contractions of his own jugular.

He needs--

Fuck it.

Kylo’s datapad is on the other side of the basin, next to the shaving kit he hasn’t touched in two days. He picks it up, and fate is written on the lock screen. 

The Holomail notification from Hux-- _please see attached report--_ winks up at him, untouched.

(Fuck it.)

He opens the conversation.

#

He hasn’t made it out of the ‘fresher before he senses Hux outside the suite. Kylo’s found there’s no damn lube in here, and he didn’t bring any because he’s apparently overestimated his own capacity for self-discipline. 

It’s fine, he tells himself as he thinks the doors apart. He shuts the gaping cabinet under the sink, stands up, and pushes his hair out of his face. Hux will have packed some. (Hux has never once overestimated him.)

Hux calls for eighty percent lights in the bedroom as he threads his way through it to the ‘fresher, a moving blot of color in the Dark of the room. It’s far worse in contrast with him. 

Kylo turns as his footsteps approach, crossing from rugs onto hardwood. Hux comes to a stop in the ‘fresher doorway and looks Kylo up and down appraisingly.

But Hux is technically in no position to criticize. His hair is as untended as Kylo’s by now, falling out of regulation and the pomade. He’s only half-dressed, in fact, the greatcoat tugged around a ribbed black undershirt. His ID tags glint on his skinny chest.

“What were you expecting?” he says, with a motion like he’s about to cross his arms, then remembers he’s wearing wearing his general’s stripes and opts for parade rest. “Dress grays for the occasion?”

Kylo shakes his head. “No, you just… you look--”

Kylo stops short, his gaze drifting further downward. With his shoulders back, the semi tenting Hux’s jodhpurs is no less than obvious. Kylo looks pointedly up from it to meet Hux’s eyes. 

“I see you’re looking forward to this.”

“Would I be here if I wasn’t?” Hux unclasps his hands, rests the left on the doorframe, striped cuff level with his head, wrist exposed.

Encouraged, Kylo takes a step forward, his own cock starting to fill at the awareness that Hux’s is straining his pants. 

“Still, General. This is a different level of desperation, leaving your quarters in this state.” Kylo reaches the doorframe, puts his right hand on it, just above Hux’s. “What would you have done if one of your officers saw you like this--that pretty cock straining to get inside me?”

Hux slides his hand up to curl icily around Kylo’s wrist. He leans in, pressing them chest to chest, crotch to crotch. “Shot them,” he murmurs, “on sight.”

“Vicious.” Kylo lowers his hand; Hux doesn’t let go of it. “I like that.”

“I’m well aware.” Hux’s breath is in Kylo’s face, the ghost of the whiskey. 

Kylo wonders briefly if his smells the same. If he’s that transparent. But Hux’s thumb is massaging circles into his wrist, and he presses forward enough for his hard cock to press into Kylo’s. And his lips, his lips are right _there_ , nipping at Kylo’s, and he’s. 

Adopting the act. All breathiness, slurred accent.

“And what, Supreme Leader, can I do for you tonight?” 

Kylo’s gone for it, every damn time. Hux sounds like he’s spent his career dancing in a cantina, not developing mass-casualty weaponry or rewriting galactic history. He’s good. 

Kylo’s eyes flutter shut at the sensation of Hux’s breath, his cock twitching with interest. He opens them again, and Hux’s mouth is still there, and his lips are-- fucking _shining._

 _Your mouth,_ Kylo wants to say, but Hux will misunderstand. Will kneel. _Your mouth, you’ve been putting something on your lips, it looks like it’s fucking medical grade, it’s working, whatever it’s supposed to do, it’s working, I want to lick it off, want to taste it, I want my tongue in the corner of your mouth, I want--_

But that isn’t what they do. That isn’t what Hux does. Or at least not with Kylo. Presumably he saves the languid makeout sessions for men who haven’t thrown him into walls.

“You know what I need,” Kylo says. He slips his free hand under Hux’s greatcoat, settles his fingers around Hux’s waist. “You always know.”

Hux leans into Kylo’s grip, takes his hand off the doorframe to wind it into Kylo’s hair. He tugs, and if Kylo weren’t already hard as hell, that would do it. Hux gets the right side. It sets every nerve in Kylo’s face tingling. His heartbeat moves from his neck to his cock. 

“Specifics, then?” Hux is saying. “I assume you had something in mind.”

“Did you bring lube?”

Hux snorts. Breaks character, for a second. Lets go of Kylo’s wrist. “Of course I did. Does that help narrow things down?”

He disentangles his fingers from Kylo’s hair, and Kylo drops his hand from Hux’s waist as he reaches across it to get at an interior pocket. The motion’s familiar; Kylo’s seen it in his sleep. The plastic bottle clicks against something metallic as Hux extracts it.

“Set it on the counter.” Kylo nods over his shoulder, moves aside to let Hux into the ‘fresher. 

“You want do it in here?” Hux asks, but complies, turning back toward Kylo with the mirror behind him.

 _I’d rather die than sprawl on that double bed, it’s fucking_ dark _out there._

Kylo closes the gap between them. “If you don’t mind looking at yourself while you’re balls deep in me.”

“Why should I mind?”

“Because--” _You’re only here to pleasure me, that’s the only reason you--_ “I don’t know.”

Hux nudges his foot between Kylo’s, as if preparing to turn him around. “Do you? Mind?”

“No.”

Kylo will close his eyes, and Hux won’t dare mention it. 

Right now, Hux’s breath is warm in his face, and his hands are on the counter. Kylo takes his waist again, turns him roughly. His own spine presses into the counter, and he pulls Hux on top of him, startling a gasp from his clinically moisturized lips. 

Hux rolls his shoulders back, as if to shrug off the greatcoat, but that. Would be too much for tonight. He looks so good with it, anyway, on top of the undershirt. His hard pink dick would complete the outfit

“Don’t bother.” Kylo straightens the collar with the Force. “I just need your cock.”

“Very well.”

Kylo could remove his own undershirt as well, but what’s the fucking point. It won’t matter to Hux. He turns around, fumbles with his waistband. Finds his hands are shaking. It takes a moment to get the jodhpurs unfastened, pooled around his knees. His boxers follow, and when he looks up again, it’s at his own flushed face and the sound of Hux’s voice.

“Pass me that, Supreme Leader.”

Fuck. Right. The lube. 

Kylo hands it back.

He doesn’t need to see Hux’s arousal to feel it crackling in the air between them. A sort of thunderstorm energy, charged particles awaiting the exact collision that will meld them into heat and light. His hands are freezing on Kylo’s hips, for all the warmth radiating from his crotch.

Kylo can picture the translucent bead of precome on the crown of his fat cock, swollen with need. The lube cap clicks open. Hux reaches around Kylo to set it on the counter, the angle pressing his erection momentarily against Kylo’s asscheek. It sets Kylo’s nerves on fire, and it’s nothing like the chemical burn of the Dark.

“Fuck, you’re hard for me,” he says, because Hux fucks harder when he’s annoyed. “Were you just sitting up, waiting for me to send for you?”

For a second, Hux doesn’t reply, and there’s just the wet sound of his lubed-up hand on his thick cock.

“I was working, until you saw fit to interrupt me.”

But his breath hitches.

“And you came running. Don’t tell me this isn’t your favorite responsibility.”

“Supreme Leader--” Hux places his sticky hand on Kylo’s shoulder. It’s warm now, but so pale in the mirror. “--this is not a responsibility.”

“So what is it, you just enjoy giving me whatever I want?” Kylo’s wrapped his hands around the counter’s edge; he watches his knuckles whiten.

“I enjoy--” There’s the soft squelch of more lube eking out. “--watching you fall apart.”

And Kylo would protest, but if he’s learned one thing in six months of this arrangement, it’s that Hux also fucks harder when he thinks he’s in control. 

“Get inside me, then.” His own voice is breathy in his ears, and he feels less than stable as he spreads his legs, bends enough for Hux to have access.

Hux reaches around again to set down the lube by the cap. Excess fluid spills over the lip of the bottle, viscous and translucent, catching the light. 

Hux’s left hand is cool on Kylo’s hip, coaxing him further apart. His right is warm, slick, probing his cleft. A fresh jolt of desire spikes Kylo’s bloodstream, dials up his pulse. 

“Would you like my fingers first, or--”

“I told you,” Kylo manages. “Just your cock.”

Hux scoffs, drags his finger further down to circle Kylo’s hole. It’s fucking electric. “Eager tonight, are we?”

“Do it, Hux. Fuck me.”

“Are you certain?” 

His fingers are so slim. Kylo can take four, easy. Hux doesn’t venture another one, just lubes him.

“You know I don’t--” Hux hooks his index finger inside Kylo, and the friction is. Incredible. Kylo bites down briefly, finishes through his teeth “--beg for it.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Hux removes his finger, and Kylo instinctively twitches backward, avoiding the emptiness. His own eyes are dilated in the mirror, bright, and fortunately not wet. He shuts them as Hux presses into him without warning, the head of his cock warm between his cheeks, teasing his hole.

In the dark behind his eyelids, Kylo senses four things: his own pulse in his own aching cock, the sting of Hux breaching him, his balls drawing up and. The dark thing, the thing he’d know anywhere. Hux’s awareness, split between Kylo and his own right sleeve. 

It isn’t as heavy now--the wave of imminent intention--as it was in the throne room (hell, as it was at the Temple, in a different life), but it’s present. Hux may not be planning, but he’s _thinking._

Kylo’s eyes are shut, and his thighs are quivering, and his throat his exposed. The blaster he’s stopped before, but not the other weapon, not--

“Take it out,” Kylo breathes.

“What?” Hux stops moving. “I’m--barely halfway in.” 

“Not your cock.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Kylo opens his eyes, and Hux is--pale, where he should be flushed. Pursing his lips where he should be asking how this feels. Inside Kylo, his erection flags slightly. Kylo doesn’t meet his own gaze.

“You think I’m vulnerable like this. You’re thinking, one flick of your wrist, and I’m bleeding down this sink.”

Hux still hasn’t moved. “Ren, I wouldn’t.”

 _Ren_ sounds nice. 

“I know you won’t. Take it out anyway.”

Hux pulls out without a word, just a soft squelch, then the snick of his knife extending from its sheath. He rolls up his sleeve to extract it fully, palms it. His gaze flutters uncomfortably between Kylo’s reflection and its haft, resting in his slick fingers.

He’s nervous, but still mostly hard. It must be a particularly incurable brand of tension. He thinks he’s courting death, and his body still wants _this kind_ of release. 

He’s thinking this isn’t the first time he’s thought of this, why now, why here, for Kylo to turn it against him. There’s a tremor in his hand as he reaches forward to set the knife on the counter beside the open lube.

“Don’t,” Kylo says.

Hux hand stills. He withdraws. “Then what--”

“You were thinking of my throat.”

Hux’s hair is a mess, and spare strands cling to his forehead. He thinks he’s going to die like this, with his cock out, suffocated on Kylo’s ‘fresher floor. They’ll take the husk of him out in the morning.

“Ren--”

“Go ahead.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.” Kylo locks eyes with him in the mirror. One vein in his own face looks darker. He doesn’t want to think about it. “Hold that where you were going to, then keep fucking me. See how weak I am.”

“You want that,” Hux says.

Kylo pretends it was a question. “I’m not going to beg for it.”

Hux turns the haft in his hand. Both sides of the blade are sharp--the width of a single molecule at the edges, the most deadly part invisible to the naked eye. Anger coalesces in his chest--he’s pissed enough to try this, and it’s encroaching on the fear. He pops his lips, sneers like he’s on a propaganda poster.

“Very well.”

In one swift motion, the metal is against Kylo’s neck, frigid above his Adam’s apple. For all his jugular’s in danger, his pulse is in his cock.

“Is that--” Hux starts.

Kylo swallows; the blade moves with it. He could die like this. “Your cock.”

Hux wastes no time nudging Kylo’s cleft, no time inching in. He pushes all the way, and pulls the knife tighter as Kylo cries out. An ugly, animal sound. Better off stifled.

The initial burn becomes manageable as Hux bottoms out. He doesn’t check in before starting to move, all shallow, rough thrusts. Hux’s bony hips buck against Kylo’s ass, ID tags tap sporadically between his shoulder blades. He’s blissfully full, and Hux knows his way around inside him--strikes his prostate on the second push.

“Feel alright for you?” he asks, hoarse and belated, as a shudder runs through Kylo’s frame, pleasure igniting every cell in his body.

He fights to keep still. Any motion against the blade, and it’ll break skin. That’s exhilarating, he finds, by the third thrust and the fourth.

“Hux.” His voice is ragged in his own ears. “Hux, I need--”

Hux snaps his hips, cutting him off into a strangled cry. “What do you need?” he breathes, halfway in.

“--deeper. More of it, I--”

It’s a command, not a request. 

Kylo looks down, and his knuckles are yellow-white on the marbled countertop. 

Hux obliges, buries himself to the base. His chest presses into Kylo’s back, undershirt to undershirt, with the tags caught between. 

The knife digs into Kylo’s skin, and he could do it. Nod forward, end this. No more Dark, no more Light, no more conflict. Just blood in the sink. He could die split by Hux’s knife, speared on his cock.

There are worse ways to go.

(The Dark is one.)

Before he can decide, a fresh point of pain distracts him--Hux’s teeth on the left side of his neck, biting a mark at the juncture where it becomes shoulder, centimeters from the strap of his undershirt. It’ll bruise. Good thing, too.

Hux pulls up, and he’s flushed now. “How’s that?” he gasps into Kylo’s ear.

Kylo’s orgasm is building in the pit of his stomach, cock straining with it. He swallows around the knife. Holds still.

“Don’t fucking stop.”

Hux pulls out in one fluid motion, then sinks back in almost as quickly. He’s panting in Kylo’s ear.

“Ren-- Ren, you feel--” He’s close now. He’s run out of complete sentences. “Ren, I’m--”

Kylo grits his teeth. “Not yet. You don’t--” He sucks in a breath as Hux thrusts in again, hitting his prostate. “You don’t come until--” He rolls his hips, without going deeper, without pulling out. “Not until--” Again. Again. 

Kylo’s vision tunnels, sparks swimming across the mirror, blurring his own face. The knife is painfully bright. He comes with a hissed exhale, and the consonants of Hux’s name tangled in the back of his throat.

Some of it hits his stomach, some of it the sink; a single stripe spatters the bottom of the mirror.

Hux fucks him through it, or starts to. By the time Kylo’s finished, he’s filling with warm, wet heat. Hux sags against his back, and his hand goes limp. The knife clatters into the basin.

“Fuck, Ren,” he breathes into Kylo’s neck. “Fuck, that was-- Fuck.”

His softening cock is slipping out of Kylo’s ass, and his spend is running hot between Kylo’s legs, and none of it should feel this good. He pulls out entirely, runs his hands through his hair in the mirror. Kylo can’t turn around and meet his eyes. His gaze, anyway, drops to the mess between Kylo’s legs. 

“Shall I--”

Some nights, he’s allowed to clean up after himself. Some nights, it helps.

“No.”

Hux crosses the room to get a washcloth off the towel bar. Kylo follows his line of motion, moving only his head. He gently wipes at his soiled, flaccid cock, and tosses the rag into the empty hamper before tucking it back into his jodhpurs.

“I don’t mind,” he says.

Kylo shakes his head. Clenches his thighs together. “That will be all, General.”

“Goodnight, Supreme Leader.”

He heads out through the open ‘fresher entrance, and lets himself out of the main bedroom.

By the time the doors whir shut, Kylo’s face is burning again. He peels off a flake of dead skin. He fucking needs to sleep.

Hux left his knife in the sink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (i) This fic is fully written, and will be updated as soon as I polish up the other three chapters. The additional tags to be added are for specific sex acts only--trying to avoid false advertising for Chapter 1!
> 
> (ii) The title is from the fantastic Matchbox Twenty album (and its title track) of the same name.
> 
> (iii) Kylo's "victory through power" quotation is adapted from the SW Legends Sith Code--different lines from this will recur in later chapters.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (In addition to more Sith Code fragments, this chapter also contains lines from the canonverse poem/lullaby 'Mirrorbright' from Claudia Gray's Bloodline.)

Midday on Qusuf IX is only slightly less dismal than zero hundred hours. More so, maybe, if you’re more used to the deep dark of space than the watery shadows thrown by a hidden sun. 

Kylo isn’t--or shouldn’t be. Over twenty-two years on a planet is far more than all but the oldest members of this organization had, and definitely more than any of the soldiers in his current party. But it’s oppressive out here, anyway--the still air, the muggy heat of heavy cloud cover, the silence. A part of him keeps waiting for thunder to crackle behind the mountains. It never does. 

The troopers feel it too, spread out behind him with E-11s cocked. After a brief initial skirmish, they’ve spent the past four hours creeping from boulder to boulder in a slow offensive line. A few missiles have flown overhead toward the base, but aside from that, nothing. 

The whole damn province feels like a thermal detonator waiting for someone to flip its switch. Kylo doesn’t trust it.

Which is why he meets SE-3140’s inquiry about the detachment’s progress with a curt, “We’ll maintain our current pace until we encounter hostiles, Captain.”

They nod their acquiescence, and know better than to ask when the hell that will be.

Kylo doesn’t have an answer for them any more than he has matching experience living in space. What he does have, though, makes up for both: they can’t feel the Darkness here like he can.

It’s a hindrance as he reaches out to ensure the valley is clear for the next move forward. Eyes shut, visor and gloved hand against the boulder in front of him, it’s like a piece of wet wool over his mind, smothering his awareness until he actively cuts through it.

It’s getting worse the closer he gets to the mine: a swirl of fear and rage and despair that overwhelms his awareness of his current surroundings. It’s disorienting, sensing this kind of thing from the _outside_. 

He opens his eyes, curls his fist against the stone. A minute fissure runs diagonally from under his hand to the edge of the rock. He didn’t put it there. It just _is_ , and the stone is still standing.

The stone is still standing, the stone is cold through his glove despite the sticky heat. The stone is here, the stone is an island, he needs to _focus--_

He reaches out, not through the Darkness, but under and around it. Senses the ridges of the land, the life forces of the troopers spread across it like a constellation. Little points of warmth, burning up and out.

_Focus._

Just the troopers. He lowers his fist to his side and turns to SE-3140.

“Advance.”

It’s a sort of ripple effect behind him, each cluster of troopers moving up diagonally, crisscrossing paths with their counterparts to take refuge behind the nearest boulder ahead. Kylo choreographed it personally after the initial environmental briefings--keeps movements tight in the event of ambush.

The troopers took to it quickly, and accomplish it more efficiently with every maneuver. Hux would approve of the synchronicity, if they were getting aerial footage of it. 

As it is, there’s no need. Hasn’t been, and definitely no need to document the slight limp Kylo’s acquired today. It isn’t enough for the troopers to question, but Hux would notice. He’d roll the holo recordings side by side and analyze Kylo’s gait, missile-trajectory style. He’d see the difference his dick made and consider it a consolation prize.

(He’ll never know how Kylo’s using it.)

It kicks in again as Kylo emerges from the shelter of the cracked boulder, hand on his saber, just in case his senses have failed him. Every step stings a little, the bruise on his neck throbs, and it takes little to imagine the phantom-touch of Hux's knife against his throat. It's perfect.

He really shouldn’t be focusing on any of the lingering sensations, not when the enemy is out here, somewhere, and the Darkness gets thicker with every step he takes, but it isn’t like he can help it. He needs it in a way Hux couldn’t understand, something to remind him he exists outside of the thing that's reeling him in.

Whatever’s out here is so much bigger than he is.

He covers the distance to the next available boulder. The rocks are growing sparser toward the front of the offensive, nearly a quarter kilometer in between each. Soon, they’ll stop altogether, and with them any semblance of cover. 

The only thing keeping the Resistance from firing on the valley will be the same thing that’s keeping the Order from bombing the mine to hell and back: untapped stores of dedlanite below ground. 

High Command had suggested just delving an Order-run mine here in the valley and fighting back the locals as necessary, but once Hux gave Kylo the budget numbers for such an installation, everyone had begrudgingly acquiesced to the combat op and assimilation of existing facilities.

Which was fine, good for High Command and their odds of keeping their airways unrestricted, but Kylo could have--would have--heeded Hux’s concerns regardless.

Hux didn’t know what they were getting into. No one did, and the fact that the situation would definitely be worse if they’d just landed in the province and started drilling doesn’t negate the fact that the campaign is going terribly.

Half these troopers have been camped out here for four days, holding a nonexistent line, waiting for their rotation back to base. Before yesterday and Kylo’s pyrokinetic experiment, they’d been losing about half their skirmishes. 

Today is far too quiet, unsettlingly so. 

They’re making more progress than they have in days, and what the _hell_ are they going to do if they reach the entrance of the mine today.

The enemy has the tactical advantage, and for all Hux keeps asking for a spy to inform on the mine’s layout and the locals’ plan of battle, the opportunity to take one alive has yet to present itself.

And the mine is the center of the _thing_ that’s here, and Kylo isn’t sure he can face--

_Stop._

_Focus._

_Through passion, strength._

Kylo presses his shoulder against the rock he’s behind. Catalogues every pain receptor in his body, probing for something to latch onto, just as he was taught.

His face is still raw, the metal of the mask chafing a bit around his neck. 

Further down, left side: it was purplish this morning, the bruise nearly to his shoulder, in the shape of Hux's kiss. He presses his shoulder into the rock in front of him, just enough pressure to jar it, redirect his sense

He opens his eyes, aware of the present again.

Just what he needed.

(Snoke’s techniques are solid. It was just that he didn’t realize Kylo had enough pain to draw on without his help.)

Kylo’s attention returns just in time: a missile flares to life across the valley, a faint cherry against the gray sky. As it arcs closer, shrieking, it’s clear the angle is too high to hit the detachment’s position, but the troopers duck and cover behind Kylo, clattering downward in their stained armor. Protocol.

Kylo announces the _all clear_ almost as soon as the rocket’s passed, but it still takes half an hour for the troopers to reassemble and get moving.

Not that it matters. It’s so quiet out here.

#

It’s 1500 standard by Kylo’s emergency comm, and at another lull, when Kylo figures it out. Or at least figures out what it feels like.

The Dark.

He doesn’t sense it fully until his mask is briefly off. He’s sucking down water while the troopers are preoccupied with roll call, and it. Hits him. Like his skin is hypersensitive to it, where the metal can’t be.

The water bottle slips out of his hand and thumps onto the dry ground as he slumps against the boulder. 

Holy shit. It’s.

It’s strong enough now, this much closer, that it's no longer featureless. Massive still, like a gravity well, but not-- _malevolent_. It has the potential to be--as he proved yesterday--but in its natural state, it's simply a huge, disinterested sensation. Huge enough, maybe, to be. Collective.

(Water spills out of Kylo’s dropped bottle, staining the dry clay ruddy as it leaches into it.)

_Collective._

Not exactly like Starkiller--that was instantaneous. One sharp moment of fear and _done_ , just a wound left in the Force, the Light reeling, the Dark gorged.

This is prolonged, steady, a lingering aura of sadness and loss. Not hopelessness, not quite, but something just as resigned. The kind of thing sentients who have never seen their own sun might feel when cornered in a mine. Kylo hasn’t felt anything like it since--

Well.

Kylo hasn’t. But Ben did, at the Alderaan reunions.

They were nightmarish in a way Leia never understood. Maybe she carried the grief, and so couldn’t sense it, but Ben didn’t carry shit. 

He didn’t know any of these people, and for all they smiled and hugged, the air around them was suffocating. They tipped back single shots of their dwindling vintages, and grief spilled out of each of their presences, like a river that had flooded its banks.

Ben didn’t feel anything in the Force itself--the Force had recovered. The people hadn’t; the pastiche of their raw emotions had hung like a stormcloud over their gatherings. Had broken a few glasses, in Ben’s efforts to keep it--

“Supreme Leader.”

It’s a different trooper this time, a footsoldier, not a captain, with their gaze down. Tracking, perhaps unconsciously, the path of the water leaking out of the spilled bottle. Avoiding his--

Fuck.

The mask is still balanced between his hip and the boulder.

Too late now, and they saw it if they were on Crait. There’s nothing _to_ see now but too many moles, anyway. 

“Report.”

“We have bolts fired on the western flank, sir. Estimate 250 hostiles.”

They didn’t have to say so. There’s a flare of heat in the Force--life and supercharged plasma--now that Kylo’s returned to himself. He pulls the helmet back on.

“Tell the captains they’re to pull back and pivot.”

Kylo heads straight west.

#

  


The sky is darkening by the time he catches his breath again. There’s no real sunset here--the dull gray of daylight just deepens to charcoal, then black--but night is coming on. The bloodshine of his saber is all the brighter in the lengthening shadows.

(Like hell he’s going to retract it, even for a moment’s lull.)

Waiting on yet another reinforcement squad, Kylo’s pulled the remaining troopers back. They’ve lost a solid kilometer of turf since the first shots, and the rebels just keep coming. They’re probably launching out of some discreet emergency exit, but there’s been no time nor access for an assessment. 

It can wait. It will all have to wait. Current priority: survival.

A livid green bolt whines past Kylo’s ear, and the saber moves up to deflect it, reflexive. It bounces back into the enemy ranks, but only singes a rock.

Around him, the troopers return fire, red bolts shrieking ahead in the dusk. Some of those hit. So do the hodgepodge blues, greens, and yellows of whatever the rebels could beg off of central Resistance leadership. The Dark swells.

Kylo swings, deflects. Concentrates. Sends the blue bolt back into the life flare where it originated. It flickers. Goes out.

Now just to replicate that enough times, reduce the enemy defenses enough to make forward momentum is possible again. If they could just get back to hand-to-hand, the fight’s won. All that remains will be the easy part: cutting down every last one of the them.

Swing. Deflect. Target. Repeat.

Four shades of blaster bolt permanently streak the air, and between rebel reinforcements and well-aimed shots, the Force is ebbing and flowing too quickly to keep track of how many sentients are on the field.

Kylo would be so fucked if not for the Dark here, flowing in and through him. It seeks a rhythm whenever he aims a bolt, guides it, if he surrenders. Focuses more on the Dark--on _extinguishing_ \--than on any physical target.

It works, but not fast enough. Never fast enough. 

( _Weak, fucking weak, undisciplined, you’re not doing enough, you’re not letting go enough,_ you _are not--_

A fresh wave of hostile energy washes over the valley. 

( _Rebel reinforcements, somewhere in the dark._ )

The troopers don’t know it. The troopers maintain formation. And their own backup won’t arrive for another ninety minutes at best.

They’ll all be dead well before then, and Kylo too. He can’t keep this up single-handedly, _he can’t keep this up,_ he--

Has the Dark at his fingertips.

Can make this stop. All of it.

Fuck it.

“ _Pull back.”_

The Force and quick-response trooper conditioning amplify his voice. The saber spits at his side.

“ _Take cover.”_

The Dark curls around him. The Dark courses through his veins. 

The Dark sends fifty bolts back into the rebel ranks.

There are eighty-two heartbeats ahead, obvious now that the trooper numbers have stabilized. 

The Dark stretches out Kylo’s left arm. 

The Dark curls around eighty-two hearts.

And squeezes. 

There’s a second of quiet before the world reels under Kylo’s feet. A sound like a massive sigh. 

The air goes cold. 

No life remains ahead of him. No Light. 

( _It worked, it must have worked, he must have—_

The world tilts, Kylo’s knees buckle, but there’s no crunch of breaking stones. Just a dull roar, like holding seashells over both ears. (Like the tide is rushing inland.)

His vision swims with static, overlaying the boulders ahead, then tunnels. Blurs at the edges. 

He’s cold, he’s so fucking cold, and—

Then it’s all Dark. 

#

The first thing in the black is music. Soft lullaby strains. A voice above a valachord—something about the moon. 

_(Mirrorbright shines--)_

A moon that never existed, and a planet that does no longer. 

_(as fires die to their embers)_

His surroundings begin to resolve: the soft grays and whites of dress garments, long observatory windows, night outside. Pastry pyramids on buffet tables. A bar lined with wine bottles and ornate shotglasses. 

_(Those you loved are with you still—_

_The moon will help you remember)_

The valachord stops, the final chord vibrating on the air. Scattered applause erupts across the room. Ben turns toward the source of the sound, Skywalker’s rat-tail tickling his cheek. 

His glass of water sweats condensation into his hand. He swirls the ice, thinks a cube in half. It divides with a satisfactory crunch, pieces settling lower into the water. 

Dad should have been here two hours ago. _(“Let me know whenever you need a rescue, buddy.”_ ) By which he just meant he’ll be Ben’s ride back to school after a three-day leave, but even school will be a relief after this. 

Well past the age to be sent off to play with the other kids, Ben’s hung near the walls since Leia’s initial walkaround. Showing him off, as always. The prince, on a technicality. The Jedi-to-be. 

The smiles this time were more tentative, the embraces shorter. Only makes sense after last year’s incident. It’s like he’s got a one-meter radius of eggshells around his feet. 

At least that’s keeping most of them at bay, letting him nurse his migraine in peace. This what he gets for keeping it all in, like Luke said. _“Focus inward, Ben. Whenever you feel the Dark creeping up on you, draw on the Light you carry inside.”_

The problem is there isn’t much Light there, or at least that what is, takes a monumental effort to channel. So his head his pounding, and he’s got a death-grip on this glass of water, but at least no irreplaceable wine bottles have shattered or voices been raised.

It’s better than last year, or it should be, but the Light and Dark are pressing against the walls of his skull, and Dad isn’t _here_ , and Amilyn keeps making eye contact with him and giving him this stupid pity smile, and.

The Dark is so loud. 

There’s little of it in anyone’s presence individually, but all their shared grief and anger and helplessness--everything they must have felt that day--seems to leach out of them, mingle, and rise. It’s hovering near the ceiling like a thundercloud, the air charged. It’s throbbing in Ben’s ears. He’s trapped in a pressure capsule. His stomach rolls, and he all but slams his glass onto the ledge behind him.

The wall behind him presses into the knobs of his spine. Vision tunnels like he’s wearing blinders. 

_Out._

He’s got to get out of here. He can’t stay, his head will implode, his skull will literally cave inward, he can’t fucking stand it--

_So go._

The thought cuts through the panic as if from outside his own mind.

Just go. You can go. _You’re allowed._

Okay.

He inhales. Exhales. 

Luke says to count. Counting helps.

_One._

_Two._

Fuck Luke.

He pushes himself off the wall and through the crowd with the urgency of a fugitive.

(Running scared. Not the Jedi way.)

“I’m not scared,” he murmurs to the voices.

 _I’m not scared._ It rolls through his mind like a mantra until he bursts out glass double doors into a moonlit corridor. He hangs a left, puts his back to the wall, and slides down it onto the floor. He pulls his knees to his chest, presses his forehead to his knees.

His chest heaves.

_Get control of it._

Get control.

_One._

_Two._

He can’t.

Every breath hangs in his throat, doesn’t go as deep as it should, and how fucking pathetic is that. Ben Solo can’t even breathe like a normal sentient being, much less go in public and pretend to be one. 

His face burns, and fucking _fuck_ , his throat is closing up, a lump swelling there. He isn’t going to cry.

 _You are_ **_not_ ** _._

He tips his head back against the wall, counting on gravity to keep back the tears.

“I wasn’t afraid,” he says again, and it echoes in the quiet hall.

_There’s nothing wrong with fear._

“I know. I just have to overcome--”

_You have to use it._

“It isn’t good for anything.”

_Feel the fear. Turn that energy into power._

“I don’t know how.”

_Let me show you._

Ben doesn’t have to say yes. 

He could go outside and walk a lap around Hanna City’s central park, then sit on a bench and read everyone who walks by. He could calm down, for the moment. 

(He could put it off. His inevitable _becoming_.)

(That's what he did, before.)

But now, he nods anyway, stands shakily to his feet. The Dark doesn’t say anything with words, but it leads him, as if he were blind and gripping a guardrail. He could let go, could sit down and wait for someone to come take him by the hand instead. But the problem is he wants this.

The Dark guides him to the end of the hallway, to a little used and unlit emergency stairwell. He plunges in, reaches out with the Force to locate an actual railing, then the first step down. 

Then the next. And the next.

He’s one flight down when his joints start aching. They’re on fire--his fingers and wrist where they’re curved around the rail, his elbow where it’s bent, his hips and knees and ankles with each step. He grits his teeth and keeps going.

_Feel the pain. Use it._

_(Turn it into power.)_

Soon, he’s got both hands on the rail, clammy against the cool metal. His knees bend only with effort, and he can’t see the bottom of the stairwell. 

He pauses for a moment, chest heaving, but the voice doesn’t let him rest.

_Take the pain--_

“I _am_ ,” Kylo hisses back at it, echoing in the sealed stairwell.

He closes his eyes, even if it doesn’t make much difference in the darkness. He can visualize the pain more clearly this way, though: a faceless gray parasite gnawing at the cartilage, or a black fire searing straight through the bone.

The parasite, he can’t use--can only defend against--but the fire. That’s a weapon. He imagines curling gloved fingers around it, letting it flow through his fingers, pressing it against his skin. He forces it down and through. Into his veins.

The relief is instant. 

It still hurts, but it’s pumping through him now, urgent, voracious. He has to go. Has to move.

It’s almost like a panic attack--all that adrenaline--but instead of fear and helplessness, there’s only focus. Amped to eleven.

_Very good._

Kylo takes the stairs in twos.

_My apprentice._

Kylo doesn’t stop until he steps down--too hard--onto solid ground.

A fresh jolt of uncontrolled pain shoots through the sole of his foot, and it drains the last of the rush from him. 

His migraine is gone, but the joint pain is back. Worse. It’s spread.

Every nerve in his legs feels-- _raw_ , ignited somehow. It’s rushing past his waist, pounding, throbbing. He feels it in his fingertips.

His head reels, disorienting in the darkness, and he splays a hand against the wall to steady himself. The stone is damp this far underground; the air smells nauseatingly of mildew.

“What is this?” he asks the Darkness.

_Use it._

“I did. Now it’s just worse.”

_Of course it is. Now there’s more of it at your disposal._

Kylo’s free hand shakes at his side. He bites his lip until he tastes copper.

“You didn’t tell me.”

_You failed to calculate._

And it laughs. 

Not loud--not necessarily--but pervasive still, like a vibration between his eardrums. It buzzes through his skull, settles somewhere between his ribs. It’s worse for the silence in here, and he--

Has to get out.

He reaches out but fails, his energy snapping back into him like an elastic band. He gropes along the wall instead, stumbling forward, blind, for what feels like at least a decade.

Finally, though, his hand meets a solid metal knob. Oddly warm. 

It’s going to be locked, he thinks. It has to be.

But fuck it. He tries anyway.

Somehow, the knob turns. A latch inside clicks to, and Kylo pulls back, allowing a sliver of light into the stairwell. It falls across boots Ben wasn’t wearing upstairs, shows black jodhpurs tucked into them. It stings his face, all but blinds him all over again, but best to get this over with. Rip it off like an old bacta strip.

He flings the door wide and plunges into whatever’s behind it. 

He shuts his eyes against the brightness at first, but slowly blinks them open.

The first thing in his line of sight is a pair of unfamiliar purple-gray blurs. He blinks again, the blotches resolving into his own hands.

“What the fuck,” he breathes, but doesn’t expect an answer.

The right is worse than the left. The skin has sunk away from the nails, making them look freakishly long, yellowish against the mottled gray of the tight skin.

The left is getting there: thin and bloodless (but still far bigger than that of the boy upstairs, long ago). The veins stand out a vivid cerulean, as if painted on top of the ashen skin. 

Both hurt like hell. Like the bone is trying to break the surface. (Like the rest of him hurts.)

But he has to know.

He purses his lips against the pain of movement and rolls up his right sleeve (black, where the boy’s was white). The wrist is the same, the skin papery, a dark and marbled gray, going greenish at the elbow.

His stomach turns, the blood rushing from his head. He can’t control his legs--they collapse under him with a flare of pain at the knees.

He tries to picture it--the fire in his hand--but it hurts to move his hand, and he can’t focus on his knees because his head is throbbing, and his nails are corpse-yellow, and bile is creeping up his throat--

(It’s a surplus. More than he knows how to use.)

 _Focus. Breathe._ Maybe if--

He opens his eyes, balls a fist on instinct. The skin grows thin over the knuckles as his fingers curl; the joints ache unbearably. 

The skin pulls. He grits his teeth, tightens his grip, forcing his fingers all the way down.

He has to. 

Has to focus, has--

He doesn’t feel the skin split along the middle knuckle, not as any sharper spike of pain, but it’s still horrible to watch. Bone erupts through it, yellow-white. It doesn’t bleed. 

“Fuck.”

It should be bleeding. His nerves are screaming, his head pounding, muscles responding to him--if with effort--and. 

He should be bleeding.

“Fuck.”

His breath comes shorter, and his vision doubles. Twice the fingers, twice the bone.

He can’t watch this. Has to get out of here.

He turns around. Even back into the stairwell would be better--

There’s no door.

There’s no fucking door.

“Okay.”

He turns back to his lap.

“Okay.”

Focus.

He can’t.

A fissure has opened in the exposed bone, or else just spread far enough that it’s visible between the loose flaps of skin. The skin itself is pulling away, opening up along the finger like a garment unzipping.

The bone is splitting too fast. It’s splitting too fast, and it’s fucking mesmerizing, the break tracing a path through it until it hits the second knuckle. 

The pain stops above it, replaced by numbness. It’s heavy. The mass of a planet hanging by the end of his finger. He can’t hold it up.

It’s falling--

He’s falling--

It’s dark again, and someone’s screaming.

_He’s falling--_

He opens his eyes before he hits bottom. 

#

It takes a few blinks for the white blurs above him to resolve into Stormtroopers crouched above him, illuminated by the soft light of a glowrod. The sky behind them is black and starless.

_Qusuf IX._

Right.

Kylo inhales deeply. Lets his pulse slow.

His joints ache, but they aren’t on fire, just pressed at odd angles into the packed earth. 

He can feel all of his fingers.

His head, on the other hand--

“Is he--” whispers one of the troopers to the other.

Kylo props himself up on one elbow before they can get to _dead._

Both heads dip, allowing a view of another shaft of glowrod light between the boulders. A regular search party, apparently.

“Supreme Leader--” starts one of the troopers.

Kylo interrupts him, clambering shakily upright. “I trust the front line has moved up.”

The blood drains from his head, but he shuts his eyes briefly against it, grateful for the mask. The troopers’ life forces blink--he finds a balance between them. Stabilizes, despite the raw, flayed feeling in his face.

“Yes, sir,” replies the trooper, but their voice is muzzy, distant.

Every nerve in Kylo’s face is on fire; he can feel the contractions of every blood vessel. A headache pounds behind his eyes. He knows what he’ll find under the mask.

It’ll be hideous.

( _Eighty-two heartbeats._ )

_(There is no door back up.)_

#

“Supreme Leader?”

The lone occupant of the transport’s claustrophobic officers’ lounge, Kylo tears his gaze from the boulders and encampments out the viewport, bathed in UV light from the shuttle’s undercarriage. He’s been looking at them too long, lost in his own mind. He clears his throat.

“What is it?”

A trooper in stained armor holds out a datapad, open to a biosensor screen. “Transmission from General Hux.”

 _Fuck._ Kylo’s in no mood to deal with that storm of emotions.

“Tell him you’ll take a message.”

The trooper shuffles. “It is a message, sir. Some sort of assessment memo.”

Delightful.

But Kylo will have to deal with it at some point.

“I’ll take it,” he says, accepting the datapad and slipping off his right glove. 

Kylo’s thumbprint pulls up what should be an after-action memo summarizing the day’s events. 

Instead, it’s a two-paragraph memorandum entitled “Way Forward for Qusuf IX Campaign. _”_ Its key assessment is bolded at the top: 

_Though today’s mass casualty action damaged no dedlanite, the systematic obliteration of a relatively small percentage of total Resistance forces cannot fill existing intelligence gaps. The campaign’s top priority should shift toward capturing sentient assets, rather than neutralizing them._

Kylo slams the datapad's cover shut, forces it back into the trooper’s hands. He’s read enough. 

Let Hux complain. He doesn’t get it. The Dark and what it does. How it overwhelms and consumes, and is _here._

Kylo turns back to the viewport. Boulders roll past, and he watches the dark spaces between them, like little curving canals. 

It’s a flimsy distraction, but it helps. For the moments it lasts, he’s able to forget what’s under the mask. 

#

Turns out it’s worse than Kylo expected. 

Worse, even, than it feels this time, which is pretty fucking impressive, because his entire face started throbbing beneath the mask the moment he stepped off the shuttle. The power grid outside the base irritated it endlessly.

It’s still pounding now, burning in the patches where it’s spread; each darkened vein feels jabbed by a dozen needles, an endless, ungentle tattoo process. 

The discoloration spreads out on either side from his blackened scar, as if it were infected. It starts sickly deep yellow at the seam, marbling out into the deep gray-green of a week-old corpse across the bridge of his nose. It disappears into his hairline, but lightens as it crosses his jaw. From the center of the rot peers a jaundiced eye.

It’s gaining on the left side too, though that’s a lighter gray, bloodless and veiny. The left eye isn’t quite as far gone as the right, though the white of it is anything but: parchment-colored and bloodshot.

The revenge of the eighty-two, or something like it.

It’s unbearable.

Kylo’s heart is loud in his ears, in his face, in his neck, his entire fucking body. He turns the faucet for background noise, lets the water pound against the basin. He washed the come down it last night, but Hux’s knife gleams off to the side.

 _You could do it. You could just fucking_ do it _\--scrape all this off, start over clean and pure._ It would hurt like hell, but _through pain, passion_.

Kylo curls his hand around the haft of the knife, but releases it just as quickly. It doesn’t work like that. New skin cells won’t fix the problem when the problem works from the inside out. 

Bacta won’t work on the cuts. He’ll bleed out. They’ll find him in the ‘fresher floor with rotten skin flapping off bone and muscle, in a pool of his own blood. They won’t even try to court-martial Hux for it. It’s too bizarre even for him, and it’s repulsive besides, and Kylo couldn’t cut this off anyway because it’s a part of him.

He tears his eyes from the mirror, stares at the steady stream of water pounding into the sink. His hand is unsteady as he reaches out to dial it up to maximum pressure.

The purplish blur in the warped silver of the faucet is his face. The light catches beside it, white flares from the fluorescents. It’s too bright in here.

The water roars. 

There is not one thing in the universe he can do about this.

His face isn’t peeling. Not even the slightest sign of scabbing over.

_(Peace is a lie.)_

Not one thing in the universe will fix this. 

He’s dying, and he’s already half-dead, and he chose this, he _wanted_ this, and there’s no turning back, and _hello, destiny, no one ever told me that you looked like shit_. Felt like hell. 

He’s clutching the countertop so hard his wrists are shaking. The plastone creaks under his grip, and _shit._

_Of course you’d break this too, young Solo. Of course everything you touch turns to debris._

The water is so loud.

His head is louder.

He stumbles back from the sink, slumps against the wall.

His eyes sting, and his throat swells. He blinks rapidly, tips his head back. He can only imagine how salt will feel in these particular wounds.

Weakness will only bring it on, weakness will only make it worse. _You cannot show--_

The sharp chime of his datapad severs the thought, and he latches onto it. Propels himself off the wall and back over to the counter. Unlocks the datapad with shaking hands.

It’s Hux.

It’s Hux because it has to be. Because Hux somehow always knows, even though he doesn’t know anything.

He’s planning out his rest cycle. He wants to know if the Supreme Leader will require anything further of him tonight.

The Supreme Leader shouldn’t. The Force-monster definitely doesn’t. 

But Kylo does. 

And his mask is to the left of the sink. 

#

“Are you fucking with me?” 

Hux showed up in twenty, but without a hard-on. Kylo may have inadvertently killed any hint of one. 

Hux led with something like, _“I suppose you didn’t summon me to discuss today’s--”_ but stopped dead once he registered the totality of--

Kylo.

Now he’s standing at the foot of the bed, fully dressed and flushed to the scalp, not even bothering with parade rest. 

Not that Kylo is in military form, either.

As soon as Hux commed that he was on his way, Kylo stripped to the skin and examined every square inch of flesh below his chin for darkened veins. Clean except for yesterday’s hickey, he put on the helmet to pretend his face was too. He then stroked himself to hardness and left the ‘fresher to sprawl across the bed, naked but for the mask, swollen cock dark red, curled toward his stomach.

Hux is unimpressed, fucking _scowling_ , with his nose a little scrunched. It’s cute, or it would be if Kylo’s face weren’t rotting and he weren’t so hard he might die.

“I’d assumed you’d fuck _me_ , General.”

There’s no vocoder in the mask now, but the tinny echo strips some of the emotion from his voice, thank every god.

Hux just snorts. “Like this? When you won’t even look me in the eye _before_ the sex starts?”

“I’m looking you in the eye right now.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know that.” 

Kylo shakes his head. “You always know.”

Hux bites his lip, balls a fist, and releases it. He’s aggravated, practically radiating it, which is one step from arousal. “I’m not fucking you in that thing.”

“Fuck me in _this thing_ , or don’t fuck me at all.” Kylo leans back against the durasteel headboard, stretches his right arm across it, aware of the swell of muscle there. Cut off his head, and he’d be fucking irresistible. “You’d do well not to forget this is a privilege.”

(Whose privilege, Kylo doesn’t specify.) Instead, he gives his cock a sloppy, left-handed stroke. 

To which Hux wets his lips with his tongue. He doesn’t argue the _privilege_ point.

“I just…” he trails off, clears his throat. “I’ll feel like I’m putting my cock into a cyborg.”

It hurts to smile, but Kylo can’t exactly help it. He bites back the huff of laughter, at least. 

With the mask on, Hux doesn’t know. 

(Doesn’t know he’s hilarious, and doesn’t know that Kylo is worse than any cyborg.)

“What’s so wrong with that?” Kylo replies. The rest--the clincher--falls out before he can stop it: “You had sex with me before you even knew what I was.”

Somehow, the air in the room changes. Hux’s energy changes, the buzz of annoyance refined to the thrum of arousal. His pupils swell.

What the _fuck._

He clears his throat again, and his hands squirm at his sides. “It wasn’t sex,” he says. “It was a handjob.”

“Suit yourself,” Kylo says, glad of the mask. 

(It was sex, of course, and Kylo fucked it up, no matter how hard then-Major Hux came, because he never asked for it again.)

Hux doesn’t reply, just swallows visibly and runs his gaze from the mask to Kylo’s thighs.

“You still got off,” Kylo prompts.

Hux looks down, slips off one glove, then the others. Pockets them. That obscene pink flush has spread to the shells of his ears, like the memory of Kylo’s ineptness is turning him on or something.

(Of course it is. Obviously.)

“I suppose I did,” he concedes, without looking up. He shrugs off the greatcoat and folds it over the back of the desk chair behind him, then starts on his belt.

Kylo watches him undress, something methodical in his movements, fluid yet controlled. It’s mesmerizing, always is, and Kylo doesn’t have to do much to maintain the erection, not with Hux’s slim waist bending, his pale thin arms soon on full display, a single lock of his hair displaced as the tunic comes off.

“Are you prepped?” he asks, turning to Kylo in nothing but briefs and shirtsleeves, void-dark against his skin. 

Hux has moles on his thighs. Not as dark as Kylo’s and not all that close together, but there. Kylo knows this, he _has known_ since they started, but _fuck--_

“Are you?”

“Uh yeah, yes.” Kylo straightens. “Last night was enough. Your lube is over here.” He jerks his head toward the endtable next to him. 

“Thank you for safeguarding it,” Hux scoffs, slightly muffled by the undershirt over his head.

“Invaluable stuff.”

Kylo manages to keep his breath from hitching as the undershirt comes off (is folded), then the briefs. They’ve done this before--taken it slow, used an actual bed, both been fully nude--but not often enough. Nothing like enough.

Hux is like something that’s shed its exoskeleton--soft, delicate under the broken shell. He’s only semi-hard, his thick pink cock beginning to swell amid red-gold pubes, but that’ll change. His body’s forgiven Kylo, where the rest of him lags far behind.

“Coming over?” Kylo tilts his head in what’s meant to be a beckon, but winds up nodding between Hux and the lube instead. 

Whatever. He needs this. Now. And it’s been proven that Hux will give it regardless.

He smiles, at any rate, even if only with the corners of his mouth. Something reptilian about that, that and the sharpness of his gaze. 

“Yes, sir, “ he says and all but _saunters_ to the bed, all jutting hips and legs for years.

Kylo’s nearly centered on the mattress, but shuffles over a few centimeters as Hux settles onto it, clearing room for him. He’s so fucking _close._ Kylo’s pulse picks up in his left temple. The blood vessels are already sensitive there--he’ll probably burst a capillary by the end of--

Who fucking cares.

Because Hux is on top of him, Hux is straddling him, Hux’s thighs are warm and his hands are cold, one on each of Kylo’s pecs. His pupils are hopelessly blown, and his lips look just a little slick. Kylo could eat him alive.

His gaze darts across the blankness of the mask, but he somehow finds Kylo’s eyes inside it. His left thumb slips down to brush Kylo’s nipple. Kylo shivers.

Hux smiles again, shows a little teeth this time. Maybe he thinks it makes him look more predatory, but it doesn’t. It so doesn’t.

He looks down, rubs circles around the same pebbling nipple.

“Did you want to go slow tonight, sir?”

“Did you?”

Hux tips his head to one side, but doesn’t look up from Kylo’s chest. “I have the next eight hours.”

That shouldn’t send a fresh jolt of heat to Kylo’s cock, but it does. The mere suggestion of a full cycle of Hux’s skin on his is fucking electrifying, for all he’s far too tired for anything like it. 

“I’d like to come before oh five hundred, if possible.”

“That can be arranged.”

Hux leans in, and Kylo grinds up into him, his erection against the delicate softness of Hux’s stomach. He places a hand on Hux’s hip, completely encircling it.

“Just--” Hux breathes against the mask. “--tell me when to pick up the pace.”

“I always do.”

“But I can’t-- I can’t read you with this thing, so--”

Kylo massages Hux’s hip, slips his hand around to knead his ass. “I’ll keep you advised.”

Without the mask, it might have come out sultry. With the echo, it comes out wooden. Kylo curses himself, but Hux doesn’t seem to mind.

“I don’t think I actually mind it otherwise, up close,” Hux says, and leans back enough to place a hand on it. Place his index finger right along the red line where it’s welded back together. “It feels like…” He trails off, tracing the seam. The pad of his finger passes across the visor, centimeters away yet completely intangible.

“Like what?” Kylo prompts, following its trajectory until it’s out of sight. He can’t feel if it’s tracing the helmet’s crown. Can’t feel anything.

Hux leans close to the mask again, until his forehead is touching it, breath is fogging it. “Like it could be a long time ago.”

His left hand has found the juncture where metal meets skin, where a fringe of hair sticks out to brush Kylo’s neck. He toys with it, caressing Kylo’s nape, without drawing back. He’s hardening fast, cock jutting against Kylo’s abs. 

He’s never done anything like this with the mask off. He’s typically accommodating at best, officious at worst. He doesn’t _caress_ , he doesn’t _go slow_. Kylo should have tried this months ago, if his face is apparently such a turnoff.

But there’s no chance to say so, or even to question exactly how long ago Hux means because his breath is suddenly fogging the visor. His mouth is on it, and fuck. His _tongue_ is on it, retracing the seam his finger just did. 

It’s bizarrely sensual, one of his hands still cupping Kylo’s neck, the other having strayed to curl around his wrist. Kylo ought to close his eyes. Couldn’t have them open, if this were happening without the mask. He isn’t supposed to see the broad side of Hux’s tongue, the smear it leaves behind.

He should be-- be _feeling_ this, not observing it through transparisteel, like one of them is a specimen in a tank. 

But before he can complain, Hux is done, inching downward to get at his neck. 

“All right?” He sounds breathless, lips hovering above the hollow of Kylo’s throat. 

“Fine.”

The fingers around Kylo’s wrist are sweating. Kylo didn’t even know Hux’s palms _could_ sweat. He didn’t know Hux licked armor, either.

“Don’t stop,” he says.

Hux hums in response, nuzzles against his throat, then bites down on the bruise he left yesterday.

Kylo hisses, does his best not to cry out. It hurts like hell, but the concentration of pain is a nice change from the throbbing in his face.

Hux smirks. “Noted.”

He has no fucking clue what he’s noting. It doesn’t matter. His tongue is out again, and _fuck_ , it’s good--a hot, wet stripe trailing down Kylo’s neck, along his collarbone. Across his scar. 

Calling attention to the imperfection, because that’s what Hux _does._

Kylo can’t bring himself to say stop, though. Can’t bring himself to say much of anything, because the contact is. A lot. The lazy, comfortable pace of it. 

Kylo’s hand is still on Hux’s ass, but he can’t do much about it. Lets it rests there. Lies back and takes this. (What he can get.)

Once there’s a slick trail of spit from the edge of the mask to Kylo’s shoulder, Hux punctuates it with a peck. No tongue or teeth. It shouldn’t pull Kylo’s attention back to his erection.

Hux pulls back enough to look Kylo in the face. “Shall I go lower?” His narrow chest is heaving. Kylo can count most of his ribs.

_Everywhere, baby, I want your mouth all over me, I want everything--_

None of it comes out. It can’t.

Kylo nods, throat dry. 

Hux purses his lips, pops them. “All right then.”

He releases Kylo’s wrist to slide his hands back down his chest. He pinches the left nipple, then the right, each pinprick of pain eliciting a sharp inhale. It’s like a drug to Kylo’s nervous system, numbing every part of his body but the point where Hux is focused.

Hux leans in again, bows his head. His hair’s coming loose, and a lock of it brushes Kylo’s sternum. He can’t fucking breathe. 

And then Hux’s lips are around his right nipple in a sort of sucking movement, which is weird for the split second before he bites down. Bruise-hard. Clear-your-mind hard. 

Kylo's breath hitches--he bites his lip against it, but the sound emerges anyway, ragged.

Hux pulls up at that, but not by much. His lips ghost across Kylo's skin.

"Seventy-eight," he murmurs, as breathless as Kylo.

"What?"

Hux's lips press down again, hardly more than a peck. "Recon found seventy-eight Resistance corpses in the valley." And again, his breath hot against Kylo's skin. "No evidence of trauma." A third time--slower, his lips parting further. "No damage to the mine."

Kylo shuts his eyes against a wave of pleasure. "Eighty-two," he says, taut. "It should be eighty-two."

Hux hmms. "Eighty-two. Not bad."

Hux ducks his head again, directs his attentions to Kylo’s left pec. Swirls his tongue around the pebbling before clamping down without warning.

"What happened to--" Kylo bites back a cry as Hux's teeth clamp down without warning. The rest comes out in a breathy rush: "--filling existing intelligence gaps?"

Hux lets up to respond, but doesn't meet Kylo's eyes. The tip of his nose rests just below Kylo's heartbeat. "Doesn't mean I can't appreciate your....technique."

For all he can't physically blush right now, the half-sensitive left side of his face heats up at the near-compliment. It's a hard-won thing, from Hux, and it sends another surge of pleasure through him. He could listen to that for--

_Focus._

Hux is low enough now that his erection is against Kylo's thigh, a promise of what's still on offer. _All_ that's on offer.

“I'd appreciate _your_ technique if you went lower," he says.

Hux props himself up a bit, then traces one blunt fingernail down Kylo’s torso. It tingles like a prolonged electric shock. “How far?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just. Make progress.”

Hux’s thumb circles Kylo’s belly button. “Understood.”

He bends lower again, to Kylo’s waist. The left side, and the puckered patch of skin across his lower ribs. The bowcaster quarrel left something like a crater there, all twisted skin and burnmarks. A preview, maybe, of what’s to come--the Force is generous like that. 

(Kylo’s read the books. Seen the holochrons and today’s vision. The rot on his face will spread with time: atrophy muscles, fracture bone, mangle skin.) 

(Hux won’t bring his mouth anywhere near it.)

For the moment, though, the fucking crater is the biggest blemish in sight, and must at least look sanitary, because Hux is tracing the edge of it, right where the nerve endings stop. It’s that electric shock sensation again, but in the good way, not the Snoke way.

“This bled awfully,” Hux says, and somehow manages to make it sound _sexy_.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t,” Hux murmurs against the skin, every syllable crisp. “You were hardly conscious.”

The last thing Kylo remembers is Hux’s fingers on his pulsepoint. How warm the leather felt in the freezing air. 

“We’re not going to discuss this,” he says, sharply. “Just because you get off on the thought of--”

“I don’t.” Hux’s reply comes almost too quickly, but he dips his head again, presses his lips to the crater’s epicenter. 

The scar itself has no feeling, but Hux’s hair brushes the skin above it, and he all but ruts against Kylo’s leg as he bends, which is. Obscene. The precome that’s been pearling at the head of Kylo’s cock leaks onto his stomach.

When Hux looks back up, his lips are spit-slick and swollen. “Will you come if I do your cock, too?”

“No,” Kylo replies, too quick for a guarantee. “Take your time.”

Hux’s gaze drops to the wet spot shining on Kylo’s abdomen. He smirks but says nothing, then dips his head, inching down to bend over Kylo’s groin.

He licks a slow stripe up the underside of Kylo’s cock, which is. 

Which is fine, because he’s sucked Kylo off at least somewhat regularly since this began, and an orgasm always requires far more than tongue. 

Kylo blinks back the white behind his eyes. Not yet.

Hux goes in for a second time, tip to base now, which is also fine, until his hand slips between Kylo’s thighs to cup his balls, stroking far too gently, and it doesn’t.

It doesn’t hurt enough. It has to hurt before he comes. He has to have something to remember this by, he can’t fall apart at a soft touch Hux doesn’t even--

“Stop.”

Hux pulls back immediately, sits up, in fact, kneeling between Kylo’s legs. His cock curls distractingly toward his stomach.

“I thought you said you wanted--”

Something clenches in Kylo’s chest. “Just fuck me.”

Hux strokes himself, a quick jerk of motion. “Of course.”

Kylo has no reason to trust the Force right now, but the lube on the endtable isn’t entirely out of reach. He stretches, grabs it, and tosses it to Hux before settling back against the pillows at the headboard.

Kylo normally says something degrading while Hux lubes himself up, or barring that something intended to be sexy that has at least never scared Hux off. He’s drawing nothing but blanks right now, though, trying to focus on the bruises forming on his chest so he doesn’t go over the edge.

The wet squelch of lube on Hux’s hand on Hux’s cock is sensual enough even on nights when Hux’s mouth hasn’t just traversed the better part of Kylo’s torso. 

(It shouldn’t be enough.) 

(It shouldn’t even be close.)

Hux’s cock sufficiently lubed, Kylo spreads his legs wider, planting his feet on the mattress. 

Hux looks at the mask. “You told me you’d prepped.”

“I can always take this.”

“I’m flattered.” Hux traces a slick finger around Kylo’s rim, then up to brush his perineum, without entering him. 

Kylo’s hips cant up toward him involuntarily. 

It’s so good, it’s so good already, and Kylo. Doesn’t need _good_. Not like this, anyway.

“I’m--” His breath hitches, and his heart is somewhere below his waist. “I’m going to put my legs over your shoulders.”

Hux’s cock twitches visibly at that, and he breathes _okay_ after an unbearable heartbeat.

At least he’s into it.

They don’t do it this way. Kylo usually isn’t even facing him, but he made no effort to flip him over, so this must-- be fine, somehow. With the mask.

Kylo hooks one knee over Hux’s shoulder, then the other, Hux adjusting his legs as best he can when his hands are so damn much smaller. 

“Feel all right?” Hux asks as he lines his cock up with Kylo’s hole.

“Fuck yes.”

Hux takes that as a cue, slips inside Kylo with an initial flare of pain that sets off sparks behind his eyelids. He bites back a cry, some part of him dimly aware it’s too soon for that. Hux has barely even breached him, he can’t--

Hux pushes deeper, with undignified little pants that only Kylo gets to hear. Only Kylo gets to fall apart to. Kylo doesn’t yell his name.

Hux bottoms out after a moment, with a gasped _fuck_ , then takes a moment to settle, moving around inside Kylo with a series of sharp pains that make him grateful for the mask.

Kylo tips his head back as much as possible, blinks rapidly against his watering eyes. He’s needed this all day, he needs it now, he needs it for the rest of his life, he needs:

Hux squirming inside him, Hux writhing above him, Hux shouldering part of his weight, Hux thrusting into him with gasps that catch in the back of his throat and come out strangled, delicate, beautiful. Hux, all his.

“Still all right?” Hux asks, bottoming out again.

Kylo opens his eyes, and Hux’s hair has fallen into his own, hanging lank and sweat-damp and unbearably gorgeous. 

“More, Hux. More, I need, I want--” _Please._ “Don’t stop.”

Hux rolls his hips in response, pulls out, then thrusts back in so quickly it wrests a shout from Kylo’s throat, carnal and inhuman. (The creature in the tank, screaming to crack the glass.)

It doesn’t matter.

None of it matters.

“Sir, you feel--”

“‘Sir,’” Kylo scoff-gasps as Hux snaps his hips. “Just say my fucking--”

“ _Ren_ ,” Hux replies, just as breathless. That isn’t right either, but Kylo’s too far gone to correct him. “Ren.”

Kylo’s pulse is in his cock, and his vision is graying, whitening, pleasure singing through every part of him as Hux slides in again, just as urgent, just as fucking _perfect--_

“Can you--” he starts, swallowing, blinking. “I’m close. Fuck. I-- Fuck, can you--”

Hux hushes him, if shakily. “Put your legs around my waist.”

Kylo drops them, does as Hux said. Frames Hux’s spine with his heels.

Hux thrusts in as if nothing had changed. Bottoms out and just _stays there._

It aches. It fucking aches, and it’s amazing, and Kylo could stay full like this forever, but he can’t. He can’t because Hux is reaching down, wrapping his slim fingers around Kylo’s cock, and stroking.

Just with his thumb. 

Base to tip.

(Kylo didn’t have to say it.)

Tip to base.

(The friction is so good, the friction is _so good_ , it burns a little because the lube is drying.)

“Ren, are you--”

“Say that again.”

“Ren--”

“Fuck--”

White explodes behind Kylo’s eyes as he spills into Hux’s hand, striping his own stomach through Hux’s fingers.

Hux strokes him through it. Starts moving inside him again and fucks him through it. He needed this, he needed, he needed, he _needs_ \--

Hux’s climax follows before Kylo’s started to come down, wet heat inside him, running down his thighs as Hux softens, gasping through it. His eyelids flutter, and his lips part delicately, and fuck, Kylo could get hard again off this alone if a post-coital haze weren’t already dragging his eyelids down.

Kylo drops his legs as Hux goes flaccid.

“Fuck, Ren,” he murmurs, and slips out, rolling off of Kylo and onto his side. His pupils have returned to normal size, but his eyes are no less arresting. “How was that?”

 _How was it_. For fuck’s sake.

Kylo could kiss him. Just fucking _kiss him._ Roll over, pin him down, devour him. He’d taste like sweat and stale tea, and that’s fine. It’s him, so it’s fine. It’s perfect. 

Kylo could lick the perspiration out of the corners of his mouth, could push past his lips and trace his teeth, his palate. He could get inside him.

He could.

“Supreme Leader?”

_Anything but that._

Kylo blinks where Hux can’t see. “Yeah.”

His hair is wrecked, and his cheekbones look filed to points. Kylo could kiss him.

He could.

If it weren’t for the mask.

If they did that.

If Hux could ever want it.

“Are you going to clean up before this all dries?”

Hux runs his gaze up and down Kylo’s body, taking inventory of the come that’s already going sticky. His nose wrinkles, and that’s what he sees when he looks at Kylo: a huge fucking mess.

“I’m going now.” Kylo shuffles upward and to the far side of the bed, swings his legs over. “I want you out of here by the time I come out.”

“Yes, sir.”

#

Half an hour later, the steam of a water shower follows Kylo out of the ‘fresher. 

He probably should have gone with the sonic, as he has every time in the past two weeks, given that water is as scarce as light on this world. But he’d been freezing cold within seconds of coming, and even the hottest sonic in the galaxy can’t make a sauna of a ‘fresher.

He’d been plenty warm during the sex, of course, but the Dark crept back as soon as the distraction ended. And now the fresh chafing between his legs is a distraction from the burning in his face, which is more than fine.

He told Hux to go while he showered, but as his eyes adjust to the dimmer lighting of the ensuite, it’s obvious: Hux... _hasn’t._

He hasn’t even gotten up, inside-out uniform still hanging over the chair by the door. He’s curled on his side, face toward the ‘fresher, asleep.

Hux is always magnetic, but never more so than now, somehow. soft and unguarded. Pulled in, Kylo takes the two steps that put him at the bedside, standing above Hux with his wet hair dripping down his back. Watching Hux’s thin side rise and fall, and wondering what the _fuck_ he’s supposed to do about this.

Wake him and throw him out, obviously, but the trouble is Hux is beautiful. 

His eyelashes are long, golden, fanning out above the shadows under his eyes. They’re obvious even in the low light, an occupational given, as are the hollows of his cheeks, the sharpness of his jaw. The silhouette of his ribcage presses against the skin, and his right hip bone juts out like a coastline. His thick pink cock lies flaccid against his thigh, which is dotted sporadically with moles and covered in fine, light hair.

He looks fucking ethereal, but he’s snoring slightly, like real, flesh-and-blood humans do.

Which Hux is. Real and warm and solid, and _in Kylo’s bed_.

A long time ago, this was all Kylo wanted. The mask is tucked under his arm, but he feels like he’s wearing it, like he’s twenty-two and infatuated, cataloguing every one of Hux’s features to jerk off to later. Nothing he memorized ever looked like this.

A drop of water rolls down Kylo’s back; he shivers. He already has goosebumps. He has no idea what to do.

He’s standing here in a towel, staring, because he can’t let him stay, but he definitely can’t wake him, and he looks so delicate Kylo can hardly think, and--

Hux’s eyelids flutter. Kylo’s rooted to the spot, transfixed as he blinks once into full alertness.

“You were supposed to be gone by the time I got out,” Kylo manages, hoarsely, as Hux gets vertical. A pitiful excuse for having stared, but it’s all he has.

“Supreme Leader, I--” Hux stops dead as soon as he meets Kylo’s eyes, his own going wide and almost scared. He’s always pale, but he loses several shades. 

“Shite,” he says. “Shite.” 

“ _Shite_ what?”

“What the fuck is that?”

“The fuck is wh--” Kylo starts, contradicting him on instinct. Before the wiring in his brain has reconnected. Before--

_Fuck._

The mask. 

All illusion of wearing it evaporates; he’s naked, exposed. Worse than if the towel dropped. A flush prickles the left side of his face. The mask is still under his arm, but it’s too late now.

Hux’s eyes dominate his face, comically wide, almost child-like. His voice, though, is acrid. “Why didn’t you just say you were injured today?”

“I wasn’t injured.” It’s out before Kylo can think to lie.

“Then what the fuck did this? What happened? It’s--”

“Nothing-- nothing happened, it just--” 

Hux raises his eyebrows, and he seems to have forgotten he’s naked in the Supreme Leader’s bed. “Just appeared out of nowhere? Totally unprecipitated? What is it?”

“Not exactly. It comes and goes. It’s--” Kylo doesn’t have to explain, and Hux wouldn’t understand. He bites his lip, holds Hux’s gaze. “It’s none of your concern.”

Hux ignores him. His gaze keeps roving over the right side of Kylo’s face, lips parted and nose crinkled slightly, drinking in--Kylo knows--the dark veins, the gray-green skin, the thinness of it. 

“Shite, it’s the single most horrifying thing I have ever seen,” he pronounces. “It looks like the skin is prematurely rotting--the discoloration, how it’s dehydrated. I’ve read about parasites that cause similar--”

“I don’t need a diagnosis.”

“Have you been to medbay about it? They might be able to--”

Kylo clenches his free hand, then uncurls it again. He feels on edge, every nerve in his body on a hairpin trigger. His pulse pounds under his right eye. Leave it to Hux to try to fix this, leave it to Hux to butt in where the Force made no place for him.

“I don’t need a diagnosis,” Kylo repeats, sharply. “I know what it is. I know what it’s doing.”

 _Shit._ Wrong fucking claim.

Hux’s brows knit together. He purses his lips briefly, then asks, deadly serious, “What _is_ it doing, Ren?”

 _Because, Ren, you look like a walking corpse_ , he doesn’t say, but doesn’t have to. Kylo can’t explain that he is one.

“Get up, General,” he says, as coldly as he can manage with his heart in his throat. “Get up, put your clothes on, and go.”

Hux keeps up the eye contact for a moment, then looks down, apparently at his own nakedness. The spark of defiance and curiosity in his gaze dies. He’s registering the dismissal for what it is.

Kylo rounds the bed as Hux swings his legs over the side. He sets the mask on the desk catty-corner to the bed and collects his datapad, then perches on the far side of the bed to let Hux dress. 

He’s fucking freezing out here, in a thin standard-issue bath towel that ends well above his knees, with his damp hair clinging to his neck. He’d get a spare blanket--he’d get his _clothes_ \--but he’d rather not disrupt Hux’s activities.

He powers up his datapad, scrolls through reports, and tries to ignore the tidy zips and clicks of Hux’s own mask reassembling. 

“Supreme Leader.” It accompanies the whipping sound of the greatcoat leaving the chairback and settling around Hux’s body. Kylo looks up. “It’s killing you, isn’t it?”

Kylo could lie. Say Hux is wrong, and this is an unfortunate pit stop on the way omnipotence.

But Hux will see right through him. He always does. Already has.

“Congratulations,” Kylo says. Hux will be counting the days.

For the moment, though, he says nothing. His lips part briefly, and something that can’t be _alarm_ flashes into his gaze, but it passes. His mouth thins, and he straightens his cuffs and collar before looking back up, expression oddly soft.

“Sleep well, Supreme Leader.”

“Go. Please.”

Hux does.

#

The ceiling in the visiting executive's suite is all ribbed durasteel, Kylo knows, like the panels of a Star Destroyer. The red and green blips of the wireless holo network, an unused projector, and the climate controls blink in a strip mounted above the desk. The room is ten panels wide.

Kylo knows all of this.

But he knows it by faith alone, because zero percent lighting renders it invisible. All of it, that is, but the insect eye-pinpoints of the control strip and the thin blue digits of the chrono on the night-table. They currently read sometime after 0200 hours, as far as he can visualize. 

(He could just turn his head, yeah, but that would deprive him of the exercise in concentration.)

He needs to concentrate. He needs to disentangle his fingers from the sheets. Needs to wipe his face. To regulate his breathing too, for that matter.

Thirty minutes of sleep after ninety of trying, and all he got was back to the bridge on Starkiller. The Darkness had rotted him in the shape of Han Solo's hand. 

He woke up as it crept down his neck, and it's throbbing harder than ever in the right side of his face. 

021__

_Something._

(Peace is a lie.)

021__

_Fuck._

(The Force shall free me.)

02--

The low whine of a rocket three storeys up shatters whatever focus he’s managed to gather. 

The motherfuckers.

They should have figured out by now that this is just a waste of ammo.

(But then again, they do have a nearly limitless supply of dedlanite, and science says the shields can’t be entirely impervious to sustained pressure over time.)

Still, there’s no danger of their giving out tonight. 

Kylo feels more than hears the missile strike the shield, dissolving against the stronger plasma field. It rocks the foundations of the fortress, and shit, maybe that’s why they’re doing it--trying to keep the entire First Order detachment as sleep-deprived as possible.

It’s fucking working, anyway.

There’s hardly any refractory period before the second missile, and Kylo digs his fingers deeper into the sheets, twisting them around the joints till the circulation gets spotty, and he can suddenly feel his pulse there instead of in his face, pressure gathering under the skin.

He spools the sheet as tight as he can, until the whole fortress is vibrating and a crust of something brushes his skin. He doesn’t have to smell it to know what it is, for the tenderness of his chest, the sting below his waist, to draw his attention again.

A third missile shrieks to life.

He frees his right hand and moves it to his right pec, to the center of the bruising.

(This is what Hux is good for.)

He presses in with his thumbnail, hard enough to sting, to momentarily draw his focus away from his face and the missiles and the Dark itself.

(This is all he needs.)

He shuts his eyes against the pain, buries his teeth in his lower lip. This brings it all back: Hux’s face--bow lips parted, eyelids fluttering; Hux’s breath fogging the mask; Hux’s cock, his hardness against Kylo’s softness. 

Some part of him is aware that he should be getting hard just thinking about it--that this is the kind of thing that fueled years of shower fantasies--but he’s too fucking exhausted.

His nails carve crescents into the flesh, and the joints of his fingers burn because he doesn’t let go. When he finally loosens his grip, his face flares up again. 

The Resistance is between rockets, and he lays in silence, listening involuntarily for the sound of the next one. 

He’s just under a sheet, the standard-issue comforter folded at the foot of the bed, and it’s cold in here. The vents are still. There isn’t a sound in the room--in the galaxy--but the rustle of his sheets as he shifts onto his left side, then flat onto his back again after a moment.

He’s fucking exhausted, and he’d sleep if he could just get comfortable. 

Another missile sounds off.

He counts twenty-five seconds before the room starts buzzing. Thirty more before it stops.

The next one is inevitable. He watches the ceiling, waits for it. Rolls over again. And back.

It’s quiet for a long time.

His face is on fire.

He can almost feel the chrono’s digits.

030--

Fuck it.

Tonight’s useless.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed.

#

  
Kylo enters the courtyard at a lull, the infrared outline of the last intercepted missiles dissolving into the invisible shield. A single floodlight mounted above the doorway illumines a narrow strip of dead grass between the fortress and an external duracrete wall. A meter out of its beam, a tall figure leans against the building. 

Of fucking course.

The shadow mutes Hux’s hair.

Kylo nearly heads back inside, but Hux immediately turns, meets his eyes. Kylo won’t be run off. 

Hux doesn’t avert his gaze as Kylo steps through the light to join him on the wall, eyes drawn to the lingering patchwork of sunken, bruise-dark skin on Kylo’s right cheek. It’s started to peel, but still aches.

“It isn’t looking any better.”

“No shit.”

On instinct, Kylo tips his head down, letting his hair fall loose over the blemished skin. _Hiding._ (Like Ben at sixteen, wanting some kind of buffer--any kind of goddamn buffer--between himself and the world, and _fuck_ \--) 

Kylo reaches up, tucks his hair behind his ear with careful precision. Hux already knows the worst. Let him be repulsed. He’s judged Kylo for uglier things than a half-rotted face.

But Hux looks away--ahead--over the wall and up at the sky. As always, it’s too cloudy for moon or stars. A breeze is picking up off east.

Nothing lives here; nothing grows. The Living Force is totally absent from the plain at night--no heartbeats, no photosynthesis. No sounds, therefore, but the gentle wind hissing between the crags. It’s deader than Moraband out there, nothing but Darkness, intractable and oppressive and more than Kylo can--

“Glad I’m not the only one who couldn’t sleep with all this.” Hux hasn’t turned back to Kylo, still staring out into the black. 

Kylo tears his eyes from it. “It’s these damn missiles.”

“These damn rebels,” Hux replies, like he believes him.

“Any intel on whether they’ll start up again?”

Hux purses his lips, finally gives Kylo his full attention. He should be hitting parade rest about now--briefer mode--but he doesn’t, just looks at him lazily. He’s wearing a gray training shirt with sleeves that dwarf his lean biceps. His hair is even messier than Kylo left it.

“Nothing definitive,” he says, after a moment, “last I checked. But the algorithms are saying yes.”

Kylo tips his head back against the duracrete. “Fantastic.”

For some reason, Hux snorts at that, then lifts the hem of his t-shirt to fumble in his pocket. He extracts a rectangular object with a foiled surface, smaller than his palm, then flips it over to reveal two white stimtabs in blister pockets. He snaps the sheet in half and proffers one of the tabs to Kylo.

Kylo recoils. Doesn’t even have to think about it. “I can’t.”

Hux huffs that little amused breath again and keeps holding it out. “It’s an energy stim, not a deathstick.”

“Not a sleep aid? You’ve given up for the night.”

“I don’t take those.” Hux stuffs his own tab into the opposite pocket, but keeps Kylo’s out. Insistent fucker. “And no, not yet, but I’ll pop this at oh-four-thirty, which is in…”

Armitage Hux actually, honest to every god, trails off. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out here. _Armitage Hux doesn’t have his datapad on him._

“A bit over two hours,” Kylo supplies.

“Fuck.”

Before Kylo can muster an equally eloquent reply, another rocket blossoms on the horizon, as if cosmically synchronized with Hux’s curse. He swears again, runs his free hand through his hair, and looks back at Kylo.

“Certain you don’t want to partake?”

And Kylo isn’t sure he’ll actually take it - isn’t sure he actually _should_ take unlabeled pills from the brilliant man who’s threatened his life on multiple occasions - but he holds out his hand anyway. 

“What’s the worst that could happen, instant death?”

“If only.”

But Hux smiles, and there’s a flare of something-- _warm_ in the Force, then unconcealed amusement in his tone as he presses the sealed tab into Kylo’s hand. 

_I wouldn’t try that_ , nearly rolls off Kylo’s tongue, deadpan for deadpan. But he’s in no position to joke about Hux’s personal safety, and the incoming missile is only growing, leaving a comet’s trail behind it in the night. Screaming, and getting louder.

It’s deafening by the time it’s close enough to light up the courtyard. Beside Kylo, Hux doesn’t so much as flinch. For someone with no appreciation for the invisible realm, he has an unshakeable faith in ion shields.

The rocket crescendos into a shrill whistle as its arc turns downward toward its target, flaring out around the head. Kylo bites his lip. Blinks. 

The missile hits the ion shields with a crackle like lightning. It starts white-hot and brilliant at the point of impact, then slowly creeps out, like fire along a branch, shooting orange through the shields’ lattice-lines as they absorb its chemical components and kinetic energy.

Beside Kylo, Hux doesn’t take his eyes off it. The glow spreading over the courtyard casts stark shadows of the bones in his face, lights up his hair and eyes. He must have looked like this by the light of Starkiller, at once chiseled from marble and burning from the inside out. He’s beautiful, and Kylo’s staring.

Hux pays him no attention until the light has almost entirely dissipated, the shields a dim netting overhead, crackling faintly. 

Kylo’s still staring. The sharp plast edge of the tab packet has dug into the meat of his palm.

“Supreme Leader.” Hux holds his gaze. “Did you want to fuck again while we’re up?”

Hux shouldn’t be able to make Kylo blush, but something about the way he offers it--casual, _care to partake?_ \--sets his face on fire. Mostly because he hasn’t so much as considered it.

“No.”

“Good.” Hux turns back to the horizon. “Me neither.”

Kylo has nothing to add, and besides, another missile has already bloomed on the horizon. It’s arcing toward the base with a delayed shriek. As it strikes the shield, Kylo feels slight pressure against his bicep. A glance down, in the glare of the wasted rocket, shows Hux’s arm lined up with his own, touching at the top, leaving their fingers just a centimeter apart. They’ve been standing close, but Hux must have shifted closer.

Kylo’s pulse picks up. Something about the lights and the proximity and the matching stimtabs. He can sense Hux’s hand like a separate living entity, the ebb and flow of blood, the whorls of his fingerprints.

Kylo looks up, watches the light, but can’t help himself. The Force must will it. He slips his hand through Hux’s. It’s warmer than he expected, and soft as always. So delicate he could cry.

In Kylo’s periphery, Hux’s head doesn’t turn, nor his expression change. He squeezes Kylo’s hand once, tightly, then lets go. But he doesn’t move away.

Kilometers away, they’ve fired a third missile.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Content warning: This chapter contains a canon-typical interrogation sequence of a throwaway OC.)

Kylo awakens to throbbing in his face, on his neck, down his chest. It’s less a burn now than something like frostbite, the sharp pinch of the nerves right before they go numb. (Except Kylo’s don’t.) He blinks into full alertness, the gray blur around him resolving into the austere lines of his borrowed suite. He must have left the lights at sixty percent.

He slept on his side, facing the doorway and the chrono on the wall. The chrono, glowing cyan in the half-light, reads 1558.

It must be wrong. 

Something happened--there’s a bug in the system, and it was reset, because this isn’t possible. Last he remembers, it was half past four, and he and Hux had parted to take stims and freshen up before muster at 0545. He’d sat down on the bed, and-- 

_Fuck._

He doesn’t have time to process the ineluctable fact that sleep has not improved his condition--as done the opposite, if the gray-green skin tone and the veins visible on his right pec are any indicator--before his datapad chimes.

He reaches for it, and it scoots into his hand over the sheets, screen blinking red. Incoming transmission from one of the field shuttles. How the hell are there any out when he’s been--

He answers before it can stop ringing, remembering belatedly that his face is both horrible and bare. He’s making to switch to audio only, when he stops dead. Forgets again.

Hux’s blue image flickers to life over the cam lens, at parade rest. Kylo doesn’t miss the grimace he schools as his gaze focuses on Kylo’s face. He’s talking before Kylo can ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing on a combat shuttle.

“Supreme Leader. Permission to report on today’s field operations?”

“I--” Kylo shuffles upward, propping his back against a pillow. “I’m surprised there have been any without me. What are you doing on this frequency?”

_Surprised you didn’t just do what you wanted while I’m ailing._

“Orders are orders,” Hux says, damn near breezy. Even through the transmission, Kylo can feel the stims in his veins. “When I saw you’d managed to get to sleep--”

“You _saw_

“I had a cleaning droid open your quarters. After you were an hour late for muster, I thought…” Hux breaks regulation to glance down, then back at the comm. “You aren’t in the best of health, Supreme Leader. I-- I had hoped some rest would actually improve matters.”

Kylo almost snaps that _well, he thought wrong_ , but his eyes are drawn to an unfamiliar mark on Hux’s face. In the blue, it looks like a faint line. Grayish. 

“What happened to your face?”

“ _My_ face?”

Kylo can’t imagine what his own looks like. “There’s a smudge on your right cheek. It doesn’t look like it’s just the lens.”

“Oh,” Hux says, “blaster graze. As for the report…”

Hux’s mouth keeps moving like he’s saying words, but Kylo doesn’t hear them. The mark seems to expand, darkening Hux’s whole cheek, Kylo’s whole line of vision. 

A bolt got that fucking close to Hux’s head, and Kylo wasn’t there to stop it. He works his free hand into the sheets, knuckles whitening.

“You left the shuttle,” he says. “You were under no such orders.”

“We suffered casualties, and were waiting on reinforcements. As the only person in this organization authorized to stand in for you, I did what that required.” Hux hardly stops for breath. “As I was saying, we managed--”

Kylo doesn’t hear him because the bolt was meant for _him_ , and he was fucking _sleeping_ instead of protecting Hux like he should have been, and somehow Hux seems completely unbothered by this. He’s just rolling past it, like Kylo didn’t nearly get him killed, like this is all part of a day’s work, which--

Which is absolutely unbearable, because _why should he expect any different_.

Kylo swallows, painful with the decay-sting. _I’m sorry_ is nothing like enough.

“We’ve finally captured an adversary scout, Supreme Leader,” Hux is going on, clipped, too professional to gloat. Maybe he enjoyed the excuse to take matters into his own hands. 

He keeps talking: “The deployed Security Bureau officers tried, but could get nothing out of them, so we’re transporting them back to base in hopes that you could… I mean, do you think you’ll be available to…” The chatter trickles to a stop. 

“Will my face fall off if I try to interrogate someone?” Kylo supplies.

“Will it?”

Kylo purses his lips. He doesn’t know. He has no fucking clue what tapping into the Dark will do with the corruption this bad. But the smudge on Hux’s face is its own kind of shadow. He clears his throat.

“I suppose we’ll see.”

#

There’s no proper interrogation room in the fortress, or at least not a properly equipped one. The entire base was apparently looted after the Empire collapsed and abandoned its outpost here, then never fully refurbished. The closest thing to a brig here is a pair of temporary holding cells three levels below ground. This deep, the cinderblock walls are perpetually damp, and reek of decades’ worth of mildew. 

Outside the first cell, Kylo makes a point not to touch the walls, dials the mask’s ventilation system up with a thought. He had enough of rank subterranean hellholes in yesterday’s vision, and if he thinks of the vision he won’t be able to--

_Focus._

On the other side of the thin durasteel door, the prisoner’s presence is steady. They’re bleeding anxiety and fear, of course, but the emotions are stable, consistent. Kylo won’t find a crying mess, which is a shame, as that tends to speed up the process.

The FOSB officer to Kylo’s left dips his head. “He’s securely restrained, sir. You’re cleared to enter at will.”

“I know I am.”

The door is old enough to be a manual slide, but Kylo thinks it open anyway. Rusty metal screeches as it pulls away from the jamb, then stops once the gap is broad enough for Kylo to enter. It squeals shut behind him after he crosses the threshold.

It isn’t quite dark enough to activate the mask’s night vision, but the light from the sputtering lampdisk overhead doesn’t quite reach the corners of the room. It’s a claustrophobic space, maybe three meters across and barely high enough for Kylo to stand upright, but he’s still got the better of it.

The prisoner, on the other hand, is bound hand and foot with standard issue binders, rope-tied to a stiff-backed plast chair. Their skin has a naturally orange tint, but their arms have gone paler below the rope, circulation clearly poor. Three short, twisted horns like a Koorivar’s line the center of their bare scalp. There’s bruising around both of their eyes.

To their--to _his_ , Kylo reads in a shallow probe--to his credit, the prisoner looks up to meet the mask. He remains silent as Kylo stops half a meter from the chair. Keeps looking up, defiant.

That won’t last long.

“Lenastor Nolí,” Kylo reads. At first brush, his mind seems completely unguarded--at least this is there for the taking. “You could have told my agents that much.”

Nolí’s anxiety spikes, unsettled by the display. 

So far, so good.

“I told your agents nothing, and I’ll tell you nothing.”

“We’ll see.” 

Kylo shifts his weight, then turns to pace to the right wall and back. His face is still on fire, but he popped Hux’s stim before leaving his suite. And it’s comfortable, falling back into what he knows. Empowering.

The pain in his face is pure energy. He takes it, balls it up, directs it toward Nolí’s consciousness.

“You’re going to show me every way into and out of that mine.” Kylo reaches the wall, turns on his heel. “You’re going to tell me how many of your fighters are posted at each gate, along with the total number in your forces. You’re going to show me your armory. And the exact quantities and types of conventional and long-range weaponry in your arsenal.” 

Kylo passes the chair, reaches the other wall and turns back. “Then you’re going to walk me through every tunnel, every corridor, and show me who or what occupies each one. Every possible vulnerability.”

“I’m not.”

Kylo lets that stop him. He squares his shoulders and crosses back to the chair to loom over Nolí. All theater, sure, but it works.

“You are,” he says. “Either I’ll take it from you, or you’ll give it to me.”

Nolí opens his mouth to respond, but Kylo lifts a hand, wills the Force to hold him completely still.

“You’re a local recruit, not Central Resistance. Therefore, the First Order will afford you the chance to cooperate.”

Nolí’s eyes flash, but Kylo doesn’t release him until he’s done with the offer.

“I will assess the veracity of any information you freely offer. Provided it’s true, your credit account will receive a substantial and untraceable deposit. You’ll then be released with an encrypted comlink to keep us informed on any developments in the mine.”

“And with a laser on the back of my head.”

“Accountability is important to the First Order,” Kylo replies, level against Nolí’s rising frustration.

It’s present now--new and raw--a righteous indignation building up alongside the prisoner’s worry and fear. Destabilizing him. Kylo can work with that.

“Where was your accountability yesterday when you massacred dozens of our people? Where was your accountability for the Hosnian--”

Kylo stops him again. “You’re declining my offer.”

“Of course I am.” 

“Unwise.”

Nolí spits on the floor, narrowly missing Kylo’s boot. 

Whatever. It’s seen far worse than terrorist saliva.

Kylo doesn’t react, just presses against the xeno’s mind, exerting the first real force he’s had to yet. Turns out there’s a barrier there--weak and instinctive and unrefined--but a barrier nonetheless, and few minds are orderly. He’ll start with suggestions, not robbery. 

“We’re aware of two commercial entrances and one emergency exit. How many others are there?”

Silence.

The xeno keeps his gaze straight ahead. Past Kylo.

“What is the total number of deployable fighters housed in the mine?”

Kylo waits him out this time, stands still, fixes him with the mask.

“I’ve already given you my answer.”

The barrier is still there, all but unconscious, little more than sheer willpower. It’s substantial, though--indicative, maybe, of some low level of Force proclivity. But there’s no attempt at an offensive.

Kylo still has the advantage.

“You’re going to tell me the total number of deployable fighters housed in the mine.”

Nolí scoffs, or tries to, a breathless, choked thing.

“You’re _going_ to tell me the total number of deployable fighters housed in the mine.”

Just a growing frustration, simmering below the xeno’s consciousness.

“That’s right,” Kylo coaxes, bending slightly at the waist. “Get angry.”

It’s a weakness. An inroads.

Nolí shuts his eyes. Inhales, exhales, as if for meditation.

Religious, maybe, but still untrained. Images drift to the surface of Nolí’s mind like so many corpses on a dark lake: a cavernous rotunda, lit orange by real fire; a waterfall pounding into a subterranean river. Serenity, or as close to it as you can get with the incessant grind of mining machinery.

“Cooperate, and you’ll get to return there.”

“Liar.”

Kylo doesn’t rise to it, pushes deeper. Breaks the surface of the lake. “You’re going to tell me the total number of deployable fighters housed in the mine.”

The xeno opens his eyes, but his posture shows none of the slackness of surrender. And there it is: an opposing force underwater: Nolí’s will, fighting against gravity. He thinks this is the only way he stands a chance.

“Why the mask?” he says, with effort. “Everyone’s seen the footage from Crait. The whole galaxy knows it’s just an arrogant, entitled boy underneath.”

It’s funny, somehow, and Kylo would laugh if the muscle strain wouldn’t hurt his face. The actual words aren’t funny--there was a time they might have hit home--but what’s absolutely fucking _hilarious_ is that the xeno is wrong.

“Is it just for---” Nolí’s breath catches. “--intimidation?”

“No,” Kylo says, and on impulse, reaches for the helmet’s clasps. They open with a hiss, and Kylo removes the mask. Bends. Sets it at his feet. Looks back up.

This should distract the xeno from his defenses.

It already has. His lips are parted, and his fear has spiked. They must not have monsters in the mines, because he doesn’t know how to process this.

Kylo bends again, bringing his bare face level with the xeno’s. Tips his chin up without touching it, forcing eye contact. 

“Not what you expected.” He doesn’t give him the chance to reply. “Tell me the number.”

The fight dies in Nolí’s eyes. Fucking finally. “Five thousand,” he says, monotone.

Perfect. Kylo stretches out a hand, pulling the xeno’s head a centimeter forward at an angle. Releases the rest of the Dark he’s been holding onto, and blows past the last of the barriers.

_Entrances and exits_. Kylo gropes for the knowledge momentarily, then latches onto it and pulls it up, like digging a seashell out of wet sand.

An image emerges, a long, black tunnel branching off into smaller corridors, each marked with a color-coded sign. Part of a grid system, then. Kylo moves forward, until a beam of light stabs down from above his head, a rusty ladder extending from the ceiling. 

_Up._

Above ground, he’s far back, at the foot of the mountains. A rocket launcher sits on the ledge above, manned by six fighters of the same species as Nolí. It’s a repurposed Imperial model, with orange paint chipping to show black beneath.

_Name._

Southern Trapdoor, Green Corridor

_Next._

#

It’s easy, once Kylo finds his rhythm, barging through every hall and tunnel and secret hatch. Twelve hidden entrances in total. 

Every path leads to a confluence--a central rotunda with signs pointing to quadrants for the cardinal directions. Seven color-coded central corridors run vertically through them in a tidy grid.

#

Armory: North Quadrant, Violet Corridor, Level Minus 10. Well-stocked but nothing newer than the past five years.

Civilian Quarters: West Quadrant, Levels Zero through Minus 5. Behind guarded doors, but accessible. 

Dedlanite: under everything.

_Number of levels._

A lift rises from a dark shaft. The lights flicker overhead, and the car’s door open. Inside, the panel runs from 2 to Minus 36.

_Minus Thirty-Six._

The button lights up, and the car plummets downward. 

Kylo skips the trip, opens the doors at the bottom, and it’s...Dark down here.

Even Nolí detects it, though he can’t identify it.

_What else._

A wall. At the end of an unlabeled, unquarried tunnel. Dedlanite glitters in the walls, but the end of the tunnel is black.

The wall.

_Behind it._

Nothing surfaces.

_Behind it._

He must know something. Kylo pushes against the stone. It doesn’t budge.

_Behind it._

He recoils, strikes it harder. Still, nothing.

Not possible.

_Something._

_What._

Nothing.

_Fuck._

He’s not reaching a dead end, not when this has gone so well so far, not when it’s finally gotten Dark, and it actually matters. 

He strikes it again. And again and again and again, until the Dark is stretched and worn and stinging. Until the xeno is screaming from far away, and Kylo is punching the rock, and it’s a blur of Darkness.

He keeps going. Doesn’t make a dent.

His hold on the Force is growing thin, tenuous, and the spark of the xeno’s consciousness flickers beside his own.

He can’t keep it up, and he has enough, at least, to inform a plan of attack.

Kylo withdraws, drops his hand. 

His chest is heaving, but it’s with adrenaline, not exhaustion. (Not yet.) He's fucking buzzing, lightheaded, can feel the Force in his fingertips. Electricity. Power.

It's done.

(He did it.)

There’s probably nothing behind the wall. Maybe the population’s collective melancholy sinks through the floor and lingers there, inaccessible. 

Not that it matters.

Because they're all getting off this rock before it can do him any more damage.

It hurts his face more to force his mouth straight, so he allows a smile, at his feet first, but then at the diminished xeno.

A trickle of purple blood streams from one of Noli's nasal slits, and his head lolls forward.

His presence ebbs, feeble. 

Kylo extinguishes it with a thought, then picks up the mask.

#

Hux is waiting outside the interrogation room, which is familiar. He and four spare Troopers look out of place in the dingy corridor--all clean armor, tidy lines, and carefully controlled emotions, in contrast to the living Force.

“Well?” Hux says, stepping away from the wall.

As Kylo approaches him, one of the lampdisks over his head sputters. None of them were doing so before. Hux shoots it a peeved glance.

“I got it.” Kylo stops in front of him. “Everything to complete the schematic. We can do this.”

Hux drags his gaze from the ceiling, bringing his face into focus under the light. He's covered the graze with a bacta strip, which is somehow worse than the raw wound.

The Force curls in Kylo’s fingertips, and he could fix it. Wrap his presence around every damaged molecule and weave them perfect again.

He would. If he could trust the Force right now. (If Hux could trust him.)

“We can likely have a fully developed plan of battle within four cycles,” Hux is saying. “It should take that long to--”

Kylo cuts him off. “Tomorrow.”

“Supreme Leader, I don’t--”

“There are only five thousand of them, and we have their house keys. Tomorrow.”

Hux's face is a study in tells--the line of his mouth, the tightness of his jaw, the slightest crinkle of his nose. His gaze flicks back to the troopers, and he lowers his voice. “Ren, just because we could attack tomorrow doesn’t mean that we ought to.”

Kylo responds at normal volume, just to piss him off. “We have everything we need. Why wait?”

“Because a poorly planned offensive could cost thousands of lives, and you’re--” Hux eyes the troopers again, falls abruptly silent. “May we discuss this in a more secure location, Supreme Leader?”

#

Hux is talking as soon as he’s seated in Furnis’ office. 

“Permission to speak frankly?” he says, so lackadaisically it's obviously going to happen with or without Kylo's blessing.

"I sense you don't approve of a timely response to the intelligence we've acquired, General." Kylo swings one ankle up to rest on his knee, then shucks his gloves.

“Supreme Leader, I sense your definition of timeliness differs significantly from mine.” 

“Yes,” Kylo says. “Yours is incorrect.”

Hux lifts his hands from his lap to the desktop, but doesn’t lean forward. “In what way? A four-day preparatory period allows time to address all eventualities, and for the infantry to become adequately familiar with the plan of battle. It guarantees victory. Anything else is a wager.”

_Not if I’m dead before the launch date._

The ache has returned to Kylo’s face, spread to his neck, shoulders, and chest under his tunic. The high has all but drained from his system, gone as quickly as it came. He’s back to feeling anything but invincible, but at least it’s a reminder why this op has to happen. Soon.

“There’s no need to sit on the intelligence,” he says. “We’ve already wasted fourteen standard days here. It’s time we secure the dedlanite and move on.”

“Which we will not be able to do if--” Hux stops short, purses his lips for a moment. “If the troopers haven’t had time to be fully briefed.”

“We don’t need to fully brief them. I’ll be in command on the ground, and I know everything there is to know about the operation. Are you questioning my ability to give tactical commands?”

Hux swallows visibly. “No.” He inhales, then lowers his voice. “What I’m questioning is your ability to do so in your present...condition.”

He has no idea. He has no _fucking_ idea. 

Sure, winning tomorrow won’t fix Kylo, but at least it won’t expose him to this for another four days. The downtime will weaken him, not help him recover (especially if Hux is busy with the planning process), but he can’t explain that. 

Hux can’t understand it, and he’s _oozing_ condescension and aggravation. Using that soft, slow tone he does with the young troopers on the _Absolution._ It rankles, especially after last night’s unexpected tenderness. 

Kylo curls his fingers around the armrest until the knuckles go white, and the veins stand out even more prominently.

“I just extracted an operation’s worth of intelligence from a high-value prisoner _in my condition_ ,” he all but snarls. “I can handle it. I have to.”

Hux just raises his fucking eyebows. Then clucks his fucking tongue. The _but can you?_ goes unspoken.

“You’re dismissed to begin preparations while I update the schematic.” Kylo pointedly breaks eye contact, looks toward the holotank. “Muster will be at 1600 hours.”

Hux thins his lips, but dips his head nonetheless. “Yes, Supreme Leader.”

He stands, and Kylo mirrors him, meaning to waste no time working on the schematic. 

Kylo’s taken a single step to round the desk when his pain flares. His vision swims with black, and the room reels.

_Shit--_

He hardly feels himself stumble, gropes reflexively for purchase on the side of the desk. A tight grip encircles his bicep before he can manage it, holding him in place.

His eardrums are loud. His arms and legs are freezing. 

He closes his eyes. Splays his fingers across the edge of the desk, easier now that he’s no longer falling. Inhales. Exhales. 

“Fuck, Ren,” Hux murmurs, close to his ear.

_Hux’s hand--_

Kylo opens his eyes, focuses on his fingers. The skin is gray. The veins are dark. 

Hux’s hand is a vice on his arm, warm even through the tunic.

“I’m--” Kylo starts, breathless. “I--”

“You need to get off your feet.” Hux’s voice is taut. “Can you walk back to the chair?”

Kylo looks up, meets his gaze. It darts urgently across the mask, apparently seeking some kind of symptom. 

“I don’t need--”

“Please.”

Kylo doesn’t let go of the desk. Hux’s fingers leave his arm, but he moves beside him, placing a hand on the small of his back. Less warm, through the cloak, but still a weight. A presence.

“Lift your hand when you’re ready,” Hux says. 

Kylo lifts it immediately, but keeps it hovering over the desktop, just in case. 

Hux guides him back to the chair, hand slipping back to his arm as he seats himself. It hovers there, the illusion of contact, then drops, for all Hux remains close.

Kylo’s head is throbbing, and the pain is back, full throttle, but his vision is clearing up, and the room, at least, is obeying the laws of gravity again. 

Hux’s lips are pursed, arms are folded. He’s close enough to the chair to touch Kylo, if he wanted to. (If he wanted to, he would.) He’s waiting on something. Maybe some further sign of weakness.

“Hux, I’m--” Kylo starts.

“Please don’t give me any bantha shit about how okay you are.”

“I am. I have to be.”

Hux clucks his tongue again, but it feels less condescending. Softer, somehow. “So you’ve mentioned.”

His arms drop to his sides, and he’s stock-still, examining his boots. When he looks back up, his lips are wet. 

“What do you need?”

Kylo doesn’t need the Force to know what’s on offer: a narrow menu of pre-negotiated sex acts. 

And that’s it. 

(Good evening, sir. How would you like your orgasm _du jour_?)

Hux can’t see him bite his lip.

“I don’t know,” he grits out. “I said I’m fine.”

Hux stiffens. “If you’re so fine, I’ll just leave you to it--”

“Don’t.” It’s out before Kylo can’t stop it.

Hux steps closer. With the height of the chair, his knees are nearly in line with Kylo’s. Nearly touching. He leans over Kylo’s lap, places his hand on the left armrest, but avoids Kylo’s arm. His voice is low again. “So what do you need?”

_Closer, I need you closer, I’m drowning. Can’t you see I’m fucking_ drowning--

Kylo swallows back the words. Flips his palm in something that’s supposed to be a beckon. 

“Come here while I decide.”

Hux’s brow furrows, and he glances down at Kylo’s thighs, then uncertainly back up at the mask. His lips thin for a moment.

He’s going to leave, of course. He has work to do, and he’s pissed that Kylo just pulled rank on him, and he--

Moves forward again. Threads first his left leg, then his right, under the armrests to straddle Kylo. He’s heavier than he looks, which is still insanely light. His ass is warm through his jodhpurs, and the weight is--good. Steady. Grounding.

He’s objectively beautiful, and his face is mere centimeters from the mask, bacta strip and all.

Kylo’s breath catches in his throat. Damn good thing there’s no vocoder, or else he’d have heard it. He seems to catch on, though.

He rocks forward, cautiously, almost experimentally, rolling his hips against Kylo’s. 

_Fuck._

Hux isn’t hard yet, but his groin is even warmer than the rest of him, his lips parted sensually.

“Alright?” he asks.

Kylo can only nod. His pulse is already moving from the decay to his groin. He lifts his hips, grinding against Hux in return.

A light flush spreads across Hux’s cheekbones and around the bandage. He presses down again, and he’s harder, hotter. Already a little breathless.

Kylo’s hardening quickly, despite the exhaustion and the illness and the fact that the Dark might very well kill him out there tomorrow. Maybe because of it.

He needs more, needs to forget. Needs to take off the mask and be held, as he is.

But that’s not on the menu.

Hux is grinding down again, his jodhpurs visibly tented, even from Kylo’s angle. Kylo manages not to buck up against him again.

“Suck me off,” he says, embarrassingly hoarse.

Hux goes still. An unreadable shadow passes across his features, then he looks up again, warm in the face, gaze sultry. He has minuscule freckles around the corners of his eyes. He sits back, weight shifting toward Kylo’s knees.

“Of course, Supreme Leader.” He disentangles his legs, then stands long enough to straighten his cuffs before kneeling.

He always looks amazing from above, and tonight is no different. His hair is less than orderly, and the bacta strip stands out. 

Kylo sits forward to accommodate him, but he makes up for it, leaning over Kylo’s thighs to get at his fly. He runs a gloved thumb down his clothed length, which feels fucking electric. 

Kylo’s cock twitches in response. One corner of Hux’s mouth quirks upward, before he makes quick work of Kylo’s zipper. He pauses at his underwear, thumbing the wet spot before eyeing his own gloves. 

“Shall I--”

“You can keep them on.”

The friction of the leather is as good as always, and Hux is careful as he takes him out. A bead of precome glistens at the head of Kylo’s half-hard cock. Hux’s tongue flicks out to lick it off. One quick motion, then his lips are around Kylo in earnest. 

Heat curls at the base of Kylo’s spine, something magnetic shooting through him. Hux’s tongue swirls around the head of his cock, then writhes beneath it as he swallows back more of his length. 

His mouth is so damn _hot_ , and doesn’t stop moving. He has a hand splayed across each of Kylo’s thighs, gripping so tightly it’s almost painful. (It’s perfect.)

_He’s_ perfect, cheeks hollowing out, the overhead light catching in his hair. It’s soft, Kylo knows. Pullable, when ungelled. Kylo can’t touch it now, though, not with his veins purple in the backs of his hands. It’s so _vivid_ , where his skin is gray and dead.

He curls his fingers around the armrests instead, knuckles yellowing. ( _The middle one will split. The middle one will split, and the bone will poke through, and there won’t be any blood, and--_

Hux’s nose presses into Kylo’s waistband. Kylo’s cock brushes the back of his throat, the unbearable heat of it, the electric sensation. Hux’s tongue swirls again.

Kylo grips the armrests. They’re the only thing holding him down. He needs this. He needs this forever. Hux’s thumbs rub his inner thighs, then his tongue moves, coaxing a strangled, animal sound from the back of Kylo’s throat.

“Hux--”

Hux nuzzles against him, and it’s good, so good, it’s perfect, but the only thing coming out of Kylo’s mouth are stifled pants and choked cries that sound more like whimpers.

He doesn’t care, nothing matters but this, but Hux, and the way he meets Kylo’s gaze, and the shape of his lips, the way his jaw contorts to make room for the thickness of Kylo’s cock.

His tongue keeps moving, and that’s--

It.

Kylo’s vision whites briefly as his orgasm pulses through him. It wracks his whole body, and he fucks once, involuntarily, into Hux’s mouth.

Hux’s throat works, swallowing all of it. He doesn’t pull out until Kylo’s spent, cock softening between his slick lips.

He wipes a line of drool from his chin with the back of his hand as Kylo looks back down at him. 

“Satisfactory?” he asks hoarsely.

“Yes.” Kylo nods, remembers to relax his fingers. The joints ache, between the beginnings of the rot and the pressure they’ve been under. “Thank you.”

Hux is still catching his breath, shoulders limp, but he manages to nod. Kylo’s cock is going flaccid against his still-damp boxers. He puts it away, as Hux makes no move to touch it again.

Still on his knees, he squirms a bit, as if uncomfortable. Another glance down shows why: his jodhpurs are fully tented, his own erection painfully visible.

Kylo can’t let this end. Can’t let himself think.

“I can take care of that,” he says, nodding downward.

Hux looks up, shakes his head. “I’ll handle it later.”

He can’t just leave to go jerk off in his quarters, though. (He can’t just leave.)

Before Hux can object again, Kylo pushes himself up from the chair, stands long enough to angle himself perpendicular to Hux and sink onto the floor beside him. He’s half on one of the fur rugs, this one thick and gray, half on the unfinished duracrete floor.

“I don’t mind,” he says, spreading his hands across his own knees. The fingers are cold already.

“I mean.” Hux’s gaze darts between Kylo’s bare and mottled hands. “I don’t know that it would be quite...sanitary.”

Of course he would say that. Think like that.

(And of course he’s right.)

But he still can’t just--

“Let me watch, then,” Kylo says, no Force in it, just need. Probably too obvious, but at this point, Hux has seen worse.

His brow furrows. “You already got off.”

Kylo shrugs, looks past Hux. “Do you need lube? I can--”

“It’s in my coat,” Hux replies, nodding obliquely toward the other side of the desk, where his greatcoat is still draped across the visitor’s chair. “I reclaimed when I checked on you this morning.” He puts his hands on his thighs, elbows bent as if he’s planning to get up.

Kylo beats him to it, flicks a wrist toward the coat and calls the tube to his hand. It takes more effort than it should--his vision tunnels for a moment--but it lands in his palm just as quickly, and the nausea passes. He wonders belatedly if Hux took the knife, too.

Hux plucks the bottle from his hand, sets it down beside him before removing his own gloves. From this close, there’s a damp spot visible on the front of his jodhpurs. He undoes them with his usual efficiency, then frees his cock from his straining briefs. It curlves immediately toward his stomach, thick and dark pink, starkly vivid against the black of his tunic.

Kylo watches in silence as he lubes up, fingers glistening as he wraps them around the base of his cock, wetting his bright pubes. He shuts his eyes, tips his head back against the under-desk cabinet, and strokes once, slowly, almost languidly.

It’s mesmerizing as he picks up his pace, thin, tapering fingers curled around that delicate cock. His sensations are all but broadcast--pleasure, relief, a bit of smugness. He doesn’t mind the audience.

As Hux finds his rhythm, his thoughts get louder. Kylo doesn’t have to press to know what he’s imagining. It plays out across his mind’s eye like the map of the mine, and he can’t bring himself to block it.

It’s too good, too vibrant. And pretty fucking hot.

The hand he sees his bigger than his own--meaty, fully human, but where it should be attached to someone, there’s only a shadow. 

Fill-in-the-blank, maybe. He’ll be able to get any hand in the galaxy around his cock once Kylo’s out of the way. Who could blame him for getting off on the anonymity of it.

As he reaches his climax, his pleasure skyrockets in the Force, singing in Kylo’s veins, even if his cock is too spent to respond to it. Hux’s breath hitches in his throat, and his teeth dig into his lower lip, jaw tensing as if to keep himself from making a sound. 

He comes with something like a hiccup, then a long exhale. Come spurts through his fingers, trickles down his bony knuckles. His nose crinkles almost as soon as he finishes, the blissed-out expression exchanged for something peeved, as if he’s disgusted by the fact that he has a functioning dick.

He shouldn’t have to look like that, uncomfortable, almost ashamed. Not when Kylo’s right fucking _here_. He could fix this for him. Wants to. 

It would be so easy to bend over, lick it off, lathe each one of those elegant fingers.

It would, if not for the mask.

If not for the fact that Kylo’s mouth and the skin around it are in even worse shape than his hands.

All he can do is think Furnis’ alcohol tray to the edge of the desk above, call the pack of chemwipes on it down for Hux’s use. They more topple this time than sail, tumbling down to land to Hux’s left. 

“Thanks,” Hux says, with a dip of his head. 

After he’s picked them up, Kylo moves to take their place, bracing his own back against the wide cabinet, thighs mere centimeters from Hux’s, one knee halfway to his chest. He kicks the hoverchair further back, then draws the other leg up.

Hux sets a total of five used wipes to the side of the rug, before apparently deeming his hands clean enough to put away his cock. He dabs at his jodhpurs with a sixth, before pulling his legs up, mirroring Kylo’s position. He runs a hand through his hair, then slings his wrist across his knees.

The flush recedes from his face as he tosses the used wipe aside--off the rug--then he tips his head back against the desk and closes his eyes.

Kylo leans back too, the mask tapping the wood jarringly. He keeps his own eyes open, though, doesn’t tear them from Hux. 

His profile is so delicate, cheekbones prominent even in this shit lighting--the shadows under his eyes, too. The stims must finally be wearing off, the bone-weariness settling back around him. 

It wouldn’t be unseemly if he went to bed now. He’s had a day on the battlefield after an all but sleepless night, then an argument and orgasm, all before 2200 hours. 

Kylo would dismiss him if he thought it would do any good, but he’d be gone if he wanted to be. As for Kylo, there are. Worse things than company, right now, even if he can’t think of the first damn thing to say.

He works his fingers into the thick gray fur of whatever polar creature died for Furnis’ rug, and tries to clear his mind.

He doesn’t get far.

“Has it gotten any better under there?” Hux turns toward him, gestures toward his own face as if to indicate the mask.

“I haven’t checked.”

“You mean you can’t tell otherwise? There isn’t…” Hux looks down at Kylo’s fingers, tangled in the fur. “I mean. Doesn’t it hurt?”

Kylo would laugh, if he had the energy. Would go off, even, because of fucking _course_ it hurts, can’t Hux tell from looking at it. But he’s exhausted, and it’s throbbing again as the post-coital high starts to wear off.

“All the time,” he says.

“And you don’t take anything for it?”

“Nothing cuts it.” 

_Except this_. _Except you inside me, overriding every sense I have. I think the universe gave me a separate set of pain receptors coded to your DNA, you don’t understand--_

Hux is looking at his own knees. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t,” Kylo returns, despite the fact that Hux almost sounds it. “And you shouldn’t be, anyway. It’s just--” He stops short, but can’t stop himself. “I never thought I would go like this.”

“‘Go’?” Hux snorts. “You mean _die_?” He hardly gives Kylo a chance to nod; he continues bluntly, sounding almost amused, “How was it supposed to go, then?”

This would be so much easier if Kylo could project it directly into Hux’s mind. There aren’t words for it--not really--at 13, the slow realization that Ben would never be enough; at 22, bleeding the blue kyber crystal, the way Ben’s life Force left it when it cracked. 

Hux can’t understand, so Kylo skirts the question.

“I mean, I never even thought I’d live this long,” he offers.

For some reason, Hux snorts again at that. Smiling thinly, he tips his head back against the desk, then studies the ceiling. 

“What?” Kylo prompts.

Hux doesn’t look at him, and the smile doesn’t falter. “Nothing. It’s just that you _actually think_ that makes you special.”

Eleven muscles to smile, and Darkness strains under every one of Hux’s. Kylo doesn’t trust himself to press, and he has no idea how to ask. Hux doesn’t owe him answers, anyway.

“You too, then,” Kylo says, after a moment. Not a question. “I thought you always had grand ambitions.”

“And I always thought you had a lofty Force-ordained destiny.”

Hux is giving nothing up, and Kylo won’t make him. It isn’t like he can ignore the jibe, anyway.

“I do,” Kylo says, “or I did. It just--” He plucks at the rug. “--took me a long time to realize what it was. Even longer to want it. You’ve always wanted yours.”

“How would you know what I want?”

He’s finally looking at Kylo, head and shoulders pivoted to face him. 

Kylo points at Hux’s forehead. “Open book.”

It’s a lie, of course. 

The only way Kylo knows is the shift of the Force in the throne room, the way he’d sensed Hux’s blaster from behind his eyelids. Known, with all the clarity of the stars and signs, that he was going to pull the trigger. Eventually. What saved Kylo’s life was how long he waited. 

But here, in dead Furnis’ cold office, Hux just scoffs. “Bantha shit.”

“What?”

“Bantha shit,” Hux repeats, settling against the desk again. His voice drops. “If you could see inside my head, you’d have spaced me six months ago.”

The trouble is, Kylo couldn’t space him if he tried. “What makes you think I won’t space you now?”

Hux reaches across Kylo’s lap to rest his hand on Kylo’s upper thigh. His fingers don’t span it, but he curls them around anyway. “This.” 

He strokes gently, all fingertips, just enough pressure to tingle through the fabric of Kylo’s jodhpurs. It feels incredible, if less than erotic. Kylo doesn’t care. Hux doesn’t stop.

Kylo should tell him he’s got it all wrong--that the sex isn’t what’s keeping him alive, or at least that the sex he means is nothing so tender as his hand right now. 

But if they start arguing, he’ll stop, and the contact feels like the one thing tethering him to reality. Hux doesn’t know it--what he’s doing--what he’s already done--what it means, any of it.

But his touch is soft, and he. He _waited_. Six months ago, he _waited_ , and it saved Kylo’s life (for _this_ , sure, but saved it still).

As his pace flags, Kylo clears his throat. He has to know.

"Why didn't you kill me that day, on the Supremacy?"

Hux’s hand stills entirely, and he withdraws it. It takes him a moment to answer, and when he does, it’s stiffly. "You woke up. I was going to."

"It took you a long damn time. Took me a long damn time to catch on.” Kylo’s goading, maybe, but he means every word. “The way the Force was moving around me, I thought I was still dreaming."

_And when I saw it was you, it kept curling and curling and I thought my hands were bound even after I was on my feet because it was_ you _and you've had my brain in a vice since I was twenty-two, and no matter what you almost did, I couldn't--_

"Don't tell me you're wishing I had." Hux sighs, twists at the waist to retrieve the whiskey bottle from the desk behind him. He uncaps it, presses it to his lips, and tips it back. Takes a positively _dainty_ sip of hard liquor, straight from the bottle, because he's a walking paradox, and Kylo can't get enough of it. "I don't want to hear it." 

"Wouldn't you have, though?" Kylo asks, grounding himself as the whiskey bottle thuds dully against the duracrete foundation through the ratty carpet. "If you'd known how it would go." 

"You mean if I'd known I would have to--" Hux stops short, lifts the bottle again, but doesn't drink. "If I'd known I'd have to sit back and watch you-- watch _this_ \--"

Kylo meant later that day, when he threw Hux around like so much debris, but Hux apparently hasn't picked up on it. It doesn't matter. He has to _know._ Has to test this.

"And what if I asked you to do it now?"

" _What?_ " 

Kylo doesn't repeat himself. Hux heard him. 

Hux is silent for a long moment, rolls the capped decanter back and forth across his slim thighs, the liquid sloshing prominently.

"This isn't a fair question," he says, finally. "If I say yes, you'll have me executed for treason. If I say no, you'll think I want to watch-- want you to suffer."

Kylo has no fucking idea what he wants him to say. He knows what _he_ would say, given the same options, but _I'd sooner kill myself_ is only a turn-on in shitty holodramas. (And it's never much of an _I love you_.)

"Just answer."

Hux turns to regard him, gaze stormy, darting across Kylo's features. "Is this you asking?"

And _shit_. It could be. It might be easier this way, if he wanted a faster way out. Death coming from another hand, far simpler than repeating what he did to Ben. 

But he was trained better than to seek out oblivion. Any sensation is better than none.

"No," he says, and can't stand to add _not yet_ , the presumption that he'll still be warming Hux's cock in five, ten, twenty standard years. However long the Dark takes to render him fit for consumption. "But would you?"

Some of the tension dissolves from Hux's shoulders. He sets the bottle back down again and slings his wrist back over his knees. The long, delicate fingers dangle off the sharp joint, and Kylo wonders what they'd feel like in his mouth rather than his ass. If they taste as good as Hux's come does. As his lips would.

"I don't know," he says. "I don't have to answer hypotheticals. But." He purses his lips for a moment, glances at Kylo. "I wouldn't want to." He licks his lips, painfully uncertain. Somehow, Kylo can't relish his squirming. "Is that answer enough?"

It isn't. ( _What were you expecting, Knight, a love confession and a potion to reverse the spell?_ ) 

But it's still more than Kylo deserves. He tips his head back against the wood of the desk, and fights the urge to thank him.

After an indefinite span of quiet, Hux picks up the decanter and turns again, replacing it. When he turns back around, he leans forward, hands on his knees, and looks at Kylo, almost over his shoulder, from this angle.

“Have you eaten?”

“Does this look like the face of someone with an appetite?” 

Kylo remembers the mask the second it comes out of his mouth, but he doesn’t backtrack--Hux is biting the corner of his lip, as if to tamp down a smile.

“You still need nutrients.” He tips his head to one side, then inhales before continuing, “I was going to ask if you--”

Kylo’s heard enough. Hux wants him well-fed to up his chances of not collapsing during the fight tomorrow. Point taken. 

“I’ll have something later.”

Hux blinks, then looks away. Adjusts his jodhpurs where they disappear into his boot. His smile is thin again, almost brittle, as he stands.

“Then I’ll get a droid to bring something to your quarters, shall I?”

“Please.”

Hux nods once, sharply, blinking again, but says nothing else before leaving the room.

Kylo stares after him for a long time. 

His face is killing him, quite literally.

He isn’t hungry.

The alcohol is just out of reach.

And he didn’t let Hux ask what he was going to.


	4. Chapter 4

Raindrops streak across the  _ Upsilon _ -class’ starboard viewport, blurring the labyrinth of boulders below into a gray haze. 

1800 hours local, and the storms started at noon. They pose no obstacle to the underground plan of battle, but they’ve made the sky look significantly lower: a layer of ordinary clouds under the thick atmospheric gases, separated like oil and water.

The  _ Upsilon _ -class is flying in stealth mode for the moment, but at fifty kilometers of the enemy line, it’ll climb to take advantage of the cloud cover. That should occur in...approximately two and a half hours, according to the schedule Kylo can sense Hux studying at the table behind him.

Never mind that Hux drafted and finalized the thing, he’s been parsing it for the better part of an hour, broadcasting a litany of overlaid time slots and projected movements. Kylo memorized it this morning, and hasn’t looked at it since. 

He spent the first hour of the flight across from Hux at his table in the shuttle’s excuse for a war room, but soon needed to stretch his legs. The cabin is hardly bigger than a closet, but at least it’s equipped with floor-to-ceiling viewports with a heavy tint. 

There’s no need for Kylo to stand guard at them, but it’s a more comfortable use of time than rereading week-old signals reports while trying not to stare at Hux over the top of his datapad. 

He considered meditation, but opted against it. He doesn’t trust where his mind will take him. He’s accidentally gone with a classic instead: the blank stare. At the wall, out the viewport, at his own feet. No conscious  _ effort  _ to empty his mind, it just sort of happens. 

It’s easy with the rain, and with mesmerizing tracks of water spidering across the transparisteel from the shuttle’s speed. The pain in his-face-his-neck-his-chest, is present, but unimportant. He’s detached from it, except for when an external stimulus pulls his attention back--rough air, a chime from Hux’s datapad or his own abandoned one, or--

“The infantry units are reporting no resistance on the ground.” Hux’s voice cuts through the static in Kylo’s brain.

Kylo’s nerves light up, or at least he remembers they’re burning. He bites his lip against the pain as he turns around. At least he has the mask on.

“I told you there was no indication the enemy is equipped to fight in adverse weather,” he snaps back. It’s good news, sure, but unsurprising.

“Outstanding assessment, then.” Hux clucks his tongue and scrolls down. “Regardless, all units are set to reach their entrance points on-schedule. Or did you know that, too?”

“I didn’t.” 

Hux has been like this for the entire day, or at least as often as Kylo’s seen him. In contrast to the unmistakable  _ softness  _ of last night, he’s curt and annoyed, particularly with the fact that Kylo knows the intel far better than he does. Happy to benefit from Kylo’s abilities, but vaguely pissed off that they are, in fact, Kylo’s. It feels like five years ago.

(And they’ve fucked since then.)

Hux’s posture straightens, but he still doesn’t look up. “Well, now you know that as of 1804 local, we’re still waiting on the disaster.”

Hux has been stuck on this most of the day, too. No outright insubordination, but as many oblique references as possible to “the chokepoint,” “the snafu,” “the inevitable hitch,” “the worst case scenario,” and “when-I-mean-if this goes to shite.”

Kylo would roll his eyes if Hux could see it. Under the mask, though, it isn’t worth the strain. 

“You haven’t even allowed for the possibility this might work.”

“Because I earned top marks in my statistics courses.” Hux taps loudly, at the screen, ungloved. “But I understand that wasn’t part of your training.”

It was part of Ben’s, of course, in another life, but Kylo isn’t about to bring up Skywalker’s curriculum. Not this close to the Dark. 

He doesn’t owe Hux an explanation anyway, never, but especially not when he’s being condescending as all hell. Like he thinks putting his dick in Kylo upon request implies some license to disrespect him.

“I don’t need specialized training,” Kylo retorts, “to know that we have enough intelligence to defeat a technologically inferior enemy in a confined battle space.”

“You mean an externally-backed enemy with a tactical and numerical advantage?”

Hux doesn’t get it. He doesn’t fucking  _ get it. _

“I mean,” Kylo says, and takes the two steps that put him at the edge of the table. He plants both hands on it, leans across to loom over Hux. “I mean,” he repeats, “a worn-down, untrained group of rebels dealing with some kind of...collective depression.”

Hux finally looks up at that, only to scoff. “I suppose you’re sensing that, too?”

“I am.”  _ And using it _ , he can’t add. Hux’s tone was dismissive, but the furrow in his brow suggests more pointed questions are forthcoming. Kylo preempts them.

“There may be some kind of tragedy in their history. Some massive trauma.” He straightens, looks out the viewport and into the gray. “But it could also just as easily be a result of environmental conditions.”

“Environmental conditions? Such as living underground?”

Hux  _ is  _ quick. It’s one of his most attractive qualities when he’s not being an asshole about it. (But sometimes despite it.)

“More or less.” Kylo paces back over to the viewport. “These people go their whole lives without seeing their sun. They’re trapped here, in this dark place, until they die. There isn’t one thing they can do about it. Imagine what that would do to a person.”

Hux is quiet for a moment. Then there’s the sound of his datapad snapping shut. And even softer, his lips popping. Kylo turns around, and Hux meets his gaze.

“I haven’t seen my sun in thirty years.”   


“And look how you turned out.”

Surprisingly, Hux offers no biting response. Just snorts, shakes his head, and reopens his datapad. He looks up from it while the screen is still blank.

“Fuck you,” he says, but he sounds more obligated than angry, and his eyes are crinkled at the corners.

(On anyone else, they’d be laugh lines.)

#

100 kilometers from the second-most massive, constant source of Darkness Kylo’s ever sensed (Snoke being the first) was not the best location at which to bring up original suns.

As the pain spikes with proximity to the mine, Kylo’s staring at the rain to mute the light of Chandrila’s star.

By the time the  _ Upsilon _ -class begins its descent, his head is pounding.

#

“Supreme Leader, the TIEs have successfully eliminated…”

Red plasma streaks through the gray. The rain smothers the explosions, leaving the blackened skeletons of rocket launchers along the outcropping.

What the analyst here in the cockpit doesn’t say is  _ twelve sentients vaporized. _

Kylo doesn’t just sense the gap in the Force left behind them--he senses their life forces dispersing, a prickle against his raw skin, like sand smarting it. 

He balls a fist at his side. Clenches. Releases.

_ Focus. _

“Ren.” Hux interrupts him with the exasperated air of having repeated himself, low and terse for the single name.

“General.”

Hux holds out a comlink. “The officers require a final command for launch.” 

Kylo reaches for the device in the Force, wraps tendrils of energy around it, and pulls it into his own hand. Pushes to talk.

“Commence operations. Ren over.”

#

The op follows what Hux referred to as  _ the Order’s prevailing total war doctrine _ , something he made sure to couch with caveats about his own support. Not that his conditions matter, as he’s stowed out of the fray, overseeing activities from the  _ Upsilon _ -class.

He did concur with it under these circumstances, though. The objective is to gain control over the dedlanite, no matter what. Only the mining equipment and the mineral itself are off-limits. 

Foodstuffs can be replaced. 

Obsolete weaponry is of no value. 

And any prisoner across the galaxy can be put to work here. 

Therefore:

Special Forces--efficient, calloused killers--to the civilian quarters.

Explosives squads to the armory, the warehouses, the kitchens and shops.

Infantry: scour every corridor, clear it of hostile life forms. (No prisoners.)

Hux’s tables say Kylo is supposed to be leading the infantry.

Hux’s tables are irrelevant.

Everything is irrelevant when the Dark calls like this. It mutes the clamor of battle, overrides his earpiece and the saber alike; it buzzes in his skull, his ears, his brain. Rattles and aches.

It’s almost physically visible: black threads writhing under his feet, leading him down and down. His only objective is to follow it, and he cuts down anyone in his way.

#

There’s a regular firefight on Level Minus Six, where a deep gorge marks the start of the mines. 

The rebels are apparently protecting their livelihood, which makes sense, except they should have devoted the personnel to protecting their children. But it’s unlikely any of them will ever know the difference.

The usual palette of bolts streaks through the air, and the chemical lighting overhead is dim. The troopers are working as one, forming a firm line and slowly walking the adversary backward toward the edge of the precipice.

Kylo dodges and deflects bolts as he carves a path through the chaos: the Dark winds through it. For all the charged plasma in the air, it’s cold down here. Or Kylo’s getting gooseflesh under his tunic, anyway.

He tugs his cloak around him as he emerges from the fracas and into a quiet corridor. A quick brush of then Force confirms it’s completely devoid of life.

At the end of it, the Up/Down panel controlling a turbolift glows green. It’s a different lift from the one the prisoner Nolí remembered, but it should have the same number of floors, the same final destination. 

Kylo crosses to it, punches for down, and leans against the wall until the car arrives. His legs are quivering, the muscle strained when it shouldn’t be. His breathing comes ragged and harsh. He dials up the mask’s ventilator, just in case it’s the smoke.

Some small, rational voice in his mind--it has an Arkanian accent--points out that running toward the thing that’s amplifying his symptoms makes absolutely no sense. Especially not when he doesn’t even know what it is.

“But it’s not like I can stop,” he counters aloud.

It’s too late. It’s calling, and it’ll be angry if he ignores it.

The car dings its arrival, and Kylo presses for Minus 36.

#

The lowest accessible level of the mine has been completely vacated. Emergency lighting glows red-orange in the corridor Kylo steps into. 

One step out, and the doors whir shut behind him. He reaches out--or tries to--but the Force boomerangs back at him, smothering. His limbs feel heavy, and his calves too weak to hold him up. His knees buckle, smacking hard against the unfinished rock floor.

_ Fuck.  _

_ Fuck fuck fuck. _

It’s so Dark down here he can hardly detect his trail from the rest of the Darkness. It floods his senses, dulls his awareness. Maybe there’s nothing--maybe this was where it was leading him all along, and it’s lured him drown here to suffocate him slowly. Maybe--

Kylo closes his eyes, splays both hands across the floor, one on each side. 

_ The wall. _

He pictures the intractable black wall from Nolí’s memories. If it’s a real place at all, it’s the epicenter. It’s where he needs. He imagines it at the end of a corridor, then his own trail walking back from it, weaving through tunnels and paths and byways to find him. 

When he opens his eyes, the thread is in front of his knees.

With a deep inhale, he pushes himself off the ground and staggers to his feet. 

The path leads him for an indefinite amount of time; he spends most of it clinging to the tunnel wall beside him, still unsteady. A fall is the last thing he needs down here.

His head is pounding. His ribcage aches inside and out, decay and a side-stitch.

_ Forward. _

_ Forward. _

_ Forward. _

He keeps moving, for all his body feels heavier with each step, for all his lips are going cold beneath the mask.

By the time the wall comes into view, each step takes effort, and a stone has settled into the pit of his stomach. It isn’t unfamiliar--having no idea where the anxiety is coming from--but it comes on unexpectedly, and scares him in its own right. Something sinister about that--the fact that this thing is real enough to have such a natural, organic impact on his body.

_ Whatever. _

_ It’s almost over. _

_ Through strength, power. _

But the thread doesn’t stop at the wall.

Instead, it dives right, into a narrow tunnel Nolí hadn’t seen. The ceiling is so low Kylo has to duck to enter it, and it’s completely unlit. The saber won’t do any good to fight this, but he ignites it anyway, to light the way.

He feels the thread as much as he sees it. Within twenty paces, it drops off. 

When Kylo’s feet catch up with his mind, he lifts the saber and finds out why.

Stairs.

The corridor abruptly descends into a staircase so curved Kylo can’t see the bottom. 

Of fucking course it does.

Bitter laughter tightens his chest, but he’s breathing too hard to let it out. He should have seen this coming. (Hell, he did.)

As he starts down it, he half-expects to hear Snoke’s voice, taunting and goading, like in yesterday’s vision, but there’s nothing. Just the in and outflux of his bloodflow and the slap of his boots against damp stone.

He keeps one hand braced against the wall, thankfully gloved so he can’t feel the slickness. 

It smells awful down here, damp and dead and ancient, but he forces himself to breathe deeply. Skywalker’s training is finally good for something--fill the lungs entirely so you don’t get lightheaded. (And fall headlong down the stairs halfway to the center of Qusuf IX.)

For all it’s downhill, his knees hardly bend by the time a dim glow becomes visible, vaguely whitish.

It takes a moment for Kylo to register what it is--it starts as a sliver, and he’s probably seeing things. (The black thread is enough.)

But it grows steadily brighter, until his eyes can’t quite adjust to it fast enough, and by the time he jams his foot on the last step, he registers a small white orb before anything else about the room.

As he blinks, adjusting fully, he tips his head back and away from the light source. The ceiling is high and rounded--this is a sort of rotunda.

The white orb is between the hands of a hunched, withered xeno of the same humanoid species as Nolí. Neither of their hands touch the light; it simply hovers there, throwing a narrow beam onto its knobbly face.

Behind the xeno lies a massive opening like an unnatural crevice, eroded at the edges. As Kylo takes it in, a chunk of stone cracks off, as if of its own accord, and tumbles into the void. Unsurprisingly, Kylo doesn’t hear it hit bottom.

The Dark is strong in here, but for the first time yet, Kylo’s physical reaction overwhelms his sensitivity to it. His heart hammers louder than his head or his swollen veins, the adrenaline of battle coursing through him, for all there’s no viable threat.

The Dark is still magnetic, but Kylo keeps his saber on. He tightens his grip on the hilt and walks toward the crevice and the xeno, leveling his gaze toward them.

“What am I looking at?” he asks, though it’s obvious: the source of both his power and his pain for the past two standard weeks.

“Not the collective despair of thousands.”

Fear coils between Kylo’s ribs--this thing’s apparently been reading his bad assessments. “Then what?” he spits.

The xeno releases the ball of light, lets it hover above their head, then float further back to hang over the crevice. 

“I think you know already, young Sith.”

Kylo doesn’t, but contradicts what he can. “I’m not Sith.”

“Not yet.” The xeno stretches out an arthritic hand, and Kylo’s blood freezes. Pins and needles dance in his feet; he takes a step forward to prove he can. 

“Very good,” the xeno snorts. “I know them when I sense them.”

“But you aren’t, either. Aren’t Sith.” 

That much is obvious: the energy they’re directing at Kylo is channeled from the well beneath the crevice, not within. A Sith is a self-propelled machine. 

The pieces fall together: how the energy emanating from the crevice is exactly what he’s been feeling since he arrived, exactly what’s been both fueling his displays of power and exacerbating the decay.

The xeno holds his gaze. “No, I’m just a--”

“Guardian,” Kylo finishes. “And a wielder.” He steps forward again, grip tightening on the hilt of his saber. “What have you been doing to me?”

“Doing  _ to  _ you? I’ve merely been projecting Darkness outward. You’re the one that’s been using and absorbing it.”

“If you sensed me, you knew I would.” Kylo steps forward again, twirls the lightsaber in a bloodlight wheel. “You did it at the cost of your own people.”

“Let us say your ability to use it so effectively surprised me.”

That rankles, as underestimation always does.

“So you just thought it would kill me.”

“I did hope.” The xeno shrugs, but lifts their hand higher. 

_ Rush them. Run them through. _

Kylo tries, but his limbs feel encased in duracrete, and his fingers go limp. The saber clatters to the floor, winks out.

“That’s better,” the guardian says, “Lord...Ren?”

“Supreme Leader,” Kylo bites off. 

At least his mouth is working. He needs to focus, has to think. Get free, somehow. Here, the planet’s Darkness is off-limits to him. He’s left with merely his own.

“Well,  _ Supreme Leader _ ,” the xeno drawls, making the title into more of an insult than Hux does, “you’ve impressed me. I didn’t think I’d have to kill you face to face.”

Kylo doesn’t humor them by asking why. It doesn’t matter. He can’t close his eyes--betray that his mind is elsewhere, but he focuses his gaze on the near edge of the crevice. A small fissure runs through a jagged lip of rock. A point of concentration. 

The rest needs to come from within, from feelings and memories and  _ passion. _

(He’s not Sith, though.)

(Not yet.)

The tactics matter, but not right now. He just needs to get away.

Anger is the readiest emotion, as always. It’s shallow but strong, directed toward the guardian: for holding him here, for targeting him,  _ weakening  _ him. In front of the troopers and in front of Hux. Worsening the pain.

The xeno interrupts him, but he manages to latch onto the emotion, keep it in the fore of his mind. It’s easy, with the bullshit they’re spouting.

“When I first sensed you, all I picked up on was Darkness. I thought you’d be an easy victory--so completely dark, you had nothing with which to fight Darkness.” The xeno lowers their hand, but Kylo’s no freer. “However, that wasn’t entirely true.”

“I’m completely committed to the Darkness,” Kylo retorts. ( _I am I am Iam I am_ ) “It’s enough to defeat you.”

“It isn’t.”

“You’re lying. Trying to distract me.”

Kylo doesn’t let it. Stares past them to the fracturing stone.

The Dark is enough. 

Always has been.

_ Fire at Skywalker’s temple. Smoke in the air and blood on his hands.  _

_ Han’s face, contorted in a shocked final rictus. The ghost of his hand on Kylo’s cheek. _

“I’m not lying ,” the guardian says. “You’d be dead if not for the Light in you.”

Kylo swallows, doesn’t look up from the crevice’s edge. “Dark and Light coexist in everyone. I choose the Dark. Every time.”

“Do you?”

The massacres speak for themselves.  _ Countless villages whose names he never knew. Civilians. Soldiers. Rebels.  _

_ Tuanul. The  _ Raddus.  _ Jarral. Twice here. The earthquake and the eighty-two. _

_ He could have stopped Starkiller, or tried to. _

Kylo doesn’t answer. Focuses on the Darkness that each victory generated, lets it flow through him.

There’s so much.

He needs to channel it, needs to use it, needs to get  _ out. _

_ (Through victory, my chains are broken.) _

“It’s a small weakness, really,” the xeno continues, “but it did save your life. Keep you from going under.”

( _ I’m drowning, Hux. Can’t you see I’m fucking  _ drowning--)

The Darkness swirls, churns. 

There’s so much, and he needs--

A low chime inside the mask interrupts him, pushes his spiritual senses momentarily aside.

His earpiece. At least it’s registering again.

“Come in,” he murmurs, low enough that the guardian shouldn’t hear.

At any rate, they ignore him. “Complete surrender to the Darkness will destroy you eventually under any circumstances, and rapidly under external pressure like mine. You can’t realize your full potential without being consumed. It’s a good thing--”

The comm rattles off the command shuttle’s frequency, then it crackles to life. 

“Come in,” Kylo repeats, just as low.

  
“--that someone still matters to you.”

The words hardly register. A sequence of tap code starts on the other end of the comm, no voice.

_ D - I - S - A - S - T - E - _

The final letter doesn’t come.

Kylo’s heart hammers in his throat, palms itch for all they’re frozen in place. 

_ Hux.  _ He was right, and Kylo can’t do one fucking thing to fix it--three dozen levels below him, pinned down by something far bigger than himself.

His breathing picks up, but he forces a measured rhythm. Completely fill the lungs, all that crap.

This is bigger than him, yes. But so was Snoke.

_ The twist of Kylo’s fingers, the clean slice of the saber.  _

_ The smell of charred flesh, and the Jedi, pleading for rebel lives. _

Kylo’s got this.

But the memories don’t stop.

_ Shit.  _

_ Shit shit shit. _

They don’t--

_ Hux’s fingers clawing helplessly at his own throat.  _

_ The way the fight in his eyes momentarily went out.  _

_ Fear. Surrender. _

_ The smack of his body against the cockpit’s paneling. _

Not victory.

Anything but.

The room reels, and Kylo fixes his gaze on the chipping crevice. The crumbling edge.

“Whoever this being is,” the guardian continues, “you might have eventually been able to shed this sense of attachment. The Sith of old were at times able to find other, less risky sources of passion--”

“Shut up.” Kylo’s voice quavers, so he clears his throat. “I’m not here for your advice. I’m here to destroy you.”

“This isn’t advice.” The guardian reaches straight upward, pulling the ball of light back toward themself. “I simply wanted to explain before  _ I _ destroyed  _ you _ .”

The light comes to rest between their gnarled hands, and they pull their hands apart, the sphere drawing out into a cylindrical beam as they do so. A dark object flies into their left hand from the back edge of the rotunda. A hilt or shaft of some kind, it fits onto the end of the light like a magnet.

The xeno’s armed, and Kylo isn’t even out of their grasp. His saber remains on the ground, out of reach. He’s going to die here, he can’t do this, he’s ill and exhausted and unarmed and--

Hux.

The disaster.

The snafu.

The black bacta strip marring Hux’s face last night.

It’s all gone to shite up there, and Kylo has to  _ do  _ something.

He reaches inside himself, to the well of passion and anger and longing and fear he’s nursed for years. The stimulating, the agonizing, the ugly. He needs all of it.

It spins inside him, surging under his skin, up and down his paralyzed body. Breaking out. Breaking past the Darkness binding him. It snaps open like cut elastic, curling outward and away. 

Kylo reaches for his saber before the xeno can stop him, ignites it as soon as it reaches his hand. Without a word, he crosses the floor, moving toward them with predatory precision. 

Further attempts to freeze him bounce feebly off his presence--they must have spent too much energy on the first try. Kylo’s been saving his.

The saber crackles, spitting sparks over his gloves as he raises it. The xeno raises their own blade to parry the blow, but Kylo slams down harder. Again and again and again. 

They may be equally matched where the Force is concerned, but Kylo’s bigger. And in proximity this close, he lets his own aura smother them, cut them off--somewhat--from their connection to the Darkness here.

None of Kylo’s emotions falter. The passion, the rage, the terror.

_ Hux. _

And maybe Kylo’s proving the xeno right. Maybe the thing that’s letting him defeat them  _ is _ the fact that Hux matters. 

But he can’t overthink. Not now. 

Too late. 

The xeno makes a jab that he barely ducks, but at the same time opens up their left side. A vulnerability.

Kylo goes for the unguarded side from his own new angle, even as the xeno charges forward again. Kylo dodges the blow, moves quickly: the quillion hits the guardian’s flesh before the rest of the blade, catching them between the ribs with a strangled gasp.

Their weapon clatters out of their hand, and Kylo pulls out and back, but leaves the saber ignited. They collapse beside the crevice. Kylo kicks their weapon out of their reach.

Purple blood streams from the corner of their mouth, but their lips move feebly. 

“This--” they murmur, “won’t--” They break off coughing. “--won’t stop--”

They stop abruptly, a final exhale wracking the frail body. Their heaving chest stills, head lolls back, the crown of it against the edge of the crevice. The fractured piece snaps off under the weight, topples down into the black.

“I know,” Kylo says, belatedly.

The corruption, they mean, and he’s well fucking aware. Nothing can stop it. His skin’s stinging again, now that the adrenaline’s receded.

The sense of external darkness, though, is notably less intense. He’s still conscious of the massive source of it at his feet, but it’s no longer pulling him down. 

Good. Fine. Whatever.

_ Hux. _

He opens his comm channel with a thought.

“Hux, come in.”

Radio silence.

No.

“Hux, come in.”

Nothing.

Fuck.

“Hux, do you copy?”

This can’t be happening.

Not after everything.

Hux isn’t there.

The Darkness that rises in response chills Kylo to the marrow: pure, unadulterated terror.

Luckily, he can work with fear.

#

The first thirty levels up are completely devoid of life, either abandoned or cleared. 

(Kylo stops the lift at each one, steps out long enough to check.)

By Minus 20, his hands are shaking.

By Minus 5, he’s breathing hard. He redirects the bolt that sails toward him and resists the urge to burn his energy on the fight here.

Minus 4 through Minus 2 are similar in aura: a monochrome clash of sentients. Dull, despite the flurry of bolts and clamor of combat.

He pushes the button for Minus 1. Feels the difference before the doors have even opened.

The solar flare in the Force.

Hux. 

Alive.

#

A yellow bolt whistles past Kylo’s ear as soon as he leaves the lift. He deflects it with the saber, aiming obliquely at the wall to his left. It doesn’t matter. The troopers can handle the fight in the tunnels. He has to go, has to get ahead. Has to.

Hux isn’t even supposed to be down here. Something must have gone wrong in the command shuttle--maybe it was stormed, maybe the troopers assigned to Level 2 couldn’t keep as firm a hold on the entrances as they were supposed to. 

Kylo would execute them personally, if they weren’t already dead; would tear them to pieces with his bare hands, because whatever happened up there, Hux couldn’t even finish his transmission. There’s no forgiveness for endangering him. (Not even for himself.)

_ Stop. _

Kylo refocuses, orients himself. Minus 1. Soldier housing. A network of dormitory tunnels, a few offices. A secondary armory. The gridwork stripe on the wall is blue.

Okay.

_ Okay. _

White armor flashes further down the corridor--five troopers. Kylo strides after them, stops them with the Force. Skims their trajectory off the surface of their minds.

The fight is apparently centered in the armory. They’ve just defeated a handful of rebels guarding the corridors, and are working their way inward to provide reinforcements. They’re needed.

“Is General Hux there?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He better be. He fucking better be.

“Keep moving.”

#

There’s fighting or something on the way. A few more clusters of rebels, maybe. 

Kylo’s hardly paying attention, just deflects the bolt in front of him. It’s harder to focus, the closer he gets to Hux, his presence in the Force growing brighter, pulsing with energy. 

Hux is probably using the SE-44C he keeps inside his coat, the gun the lube kept rattling against. Kylo wonders if he collected his knife from the fresher when he took the lube. He might need it in there.

In the armory. 

In  _ here. _

A massively thick set of double doors mark the entrance to the armory, both charred and hanging off their hinges, blasted through by thermal detonators charged with axidite. Exactly four of them. Kylo knows this. Hux wrote this.

But this isn’t the time for an after-action assessment.

Kylo doesn’t hesitate before plunging in. The air swims with bolts, and smoke hangs dark near the ceiling. Piles of blackened debris that must have been shelves and vaults of weaponry haphazardly cover the floor, low enough that a complete view of the room is possible from the entrance. Burned and bloodied bodies—miners and troopers alike—sprawl across the rubble. 

At first glance, there’s no clear winning side, though the majority of corpses are rebels. The miners appear to be operating from the right side of the room; most troopers are clustered on the left. The middle of the room is chaotic--bolts shrieking, hand-to-hand tussles. No one appears to be making any progress.

Kylo dismisses the soldiers he entered with to join the ranks, but doesn’t himself move. He ignites the saber and bats back a few stray bolts, summoning the Force. He has something better than the saber. 

He raises his left hand toward the pile of rubble nearest the enemy side. A thick durasteel vault--charred and dented, but intact--pokes out of the ashes and burnt plast. He flicks his wrist, and the Force raises it. Not Dark or Light, not really, just moving matter. Easy.

He guides it up five meters, until the metal crunches against the ceiling. For a moment, all blasterfire stops. Kylo is the only being in the room, the only being in the entire galaxy, and the strings that bind it together obey him. He inhales.

And drops the vault.

It lands in the thick of the rebels in a cloud of dust, killing  _ one, two, three…twelve _ of them instantly. The impact reverbs through the floor, but the floor is thick enough that no damage is done. Shouting rises from the rebel ranks. Another fighter dies of their injuries.

Then a single red bolt streaks toward them from the other side, and the fight is back on.

Damn.

It worked.

A few more like that will clear the room. 

Kylo moves to a less exposed spot--an alcove slightly back from the troopers--and starts scanning the debris for more potential weapons.

“Where the fuck were you four hours ago?” Kylo whirls toward the sound of Hux’s voice. “We could have used a display like that.”

Kylo doesn’t respond for a moment, just. Drinks him in. Hux’s hair is still mostly in place, and his face is smudged with battle grime, but uninjured. It’s all Kylo can do not to throw his arms around him. Luckily, the smoking blaster in Hux’s hand is a deterrent.

“Where were  _ you _ ?” Kylo finally says. “Your transmission cut off, and you didn’t pick up when I commed you back.”

Hux thins his lips. “They took the shuttle, so I led the men down. We’ve had slightly better luck until this armory. You?”

“Minus 6 through Minus 36 are clear.”

“And you checked them all singlehandedly?”

“More or less.” Kylo shrugs, breaks eye contact long enough to deflect a bolt with the Force. It zings back into the fray. 

Hux’s gaze follows it. “Of course you did.”

“You’re welcome.”

Hux snorts, looks back at him. “Well, we could use some more of--” He wiggles his fingers vaguely toward the debris. “--all that.”

Kylo’s already raising a chunk of duracrete shelving.

#

Hux stays beside him as the firefight continues, the precision of his movements unbearably distracting. The angle of his shoulders, the way he squints through the pistol’s sights. The growing pile of blaster cartridges around his boots.

It puts Kylo’s own blunt-force technique to shame, but blunt force is more efficient, so he doesn’t stop. Doesn’t move away, or ask Hux to, for all it would probably improve his aim. 

The rebel numbers dwindle, and no reinforcements appear. 

The bolts keep coming, though, and the Order’s total war MO goes unspoken. Fire and fire and fire and fire, until the number of hostiles has reached zero.

Seventy, fifty, forty-five, and counting.

They’re getting damn close.

#

After dropping the durasteel frame of a blaster case-- _ five dead,  _ twenty-seven remaining--Kylo sags against the wall, breathing hard. Closes his eyes. Swallows. This is almost over.

His face is still throbbing, but it’s better than it was. Somehow, his headache is gone.

Hux dismissed two squadrons of troopers to scour the rest of the level. Those left behind are more than sufficient for the final maneuvers: they all but surround the remaining rebels, and tend to avoid the shelves and vaults that periodically rain down.

Still to his right, Hux is discussing cleanup procedures with a kevlar-clad officer, blaster in hand but uncocked. He’s received reports of final skirmishes on Minus 2 through Minus 5. Victory in the making.

Kylo turns to catch up on the conversation--let the troopers handle the rest of this--when a flash of green erupts in his periphery. He whirls back around, and reacts on instinct.

The stray bolt freezes half a meter from Hux’s chest, crackling feebly.

“Fuck,” Kylo breathes, forcing it back toward the enemy line.

“Ren--” Hux starts, but looks more worried than grateful. His gaze is over Kylo’s shoulder, fixated on--

Kylo feels the impact of the bolt--too late to see anything but the smoking rent in his left sleeve, just below the shoulder. 

The pain is no worse--objectively speaking--than anything else he’s felt today, and he’s been shot before, but that doesn’t take away the shock of it. The hazy feeling as he leans against the wall again, instinctively reaches for it with the same hand, the saber clutched tight in his right.

Hux curses from beside him, and two red bolts streak across Kylo’s line of sight. He follows them, feeling less than embodied. They imbed in the chest of a fleeing miner. The miner falls, and Hux tucks away his blaster.

#

“Hey.”

“Good morning.”

Hux’s gaze roves Kylo’s body, lingering first on the mask, then the flesh-colored edge of bacta patch left exposed by his sleeve. He’s perched on the couch in Kylo’s little-used office, the holotank in the low caf-table lit up blue in front of him. 

After a brief rest cycle, the  _ Finalizer  _ remains in orbit above Qusuf IX, making preparations to depart the system. Hux commed to announce he was on the way before Kylo was quite awake, and left time only to throw on the mask to cover the scabbing.

Hux, on the other hand, looks impeccable, even with the shadows under his eyes. His fingers tap staccato against his knee, as if he can’t stop moving.

“You didn’t sleep,” Kylo observes, crossing the floor to sit beside him. Better view of the schematic from this angle. Just that.

Hux looks down at his datapad. “I had to prepare this briefing, Supreme Leader.”

“It could have waited.” Kylo settles back against the cushions, stretches his arms. “I can’t have you falling apart.”

“No danger of that, sir.”

_ For fuck’s sake.  _ Sir again.

“You don’t have to--” Kylo starts.

Hux cuts him off, without so much as glancing up. “How’s your shoulder?” he asks, almost perfunctory. His lips thin as soon as it comes out of his mouth, though, in a way that doesn’t match the bland tone.

“Fine. Thank you.”

“Good.” Hux’s gaze darts up to the bacta patch, still wearing that funny thin frown. 

He’s-- _ nervous _ , or at least that’s all Kylo can read. It’s kind of a cute look on him, or it would be if Kylo had never given him reason to be afraid.

There’s something else too, but he’s tamped the emotion down so deeply--keeping it even from himself-- that Kylo would have to probe for it. Kylo won’t. It’s probably just the usual edge of murderous intent, anyway. Kind of him to bury it when Kylo’s just saved his life.

“You didn’t come here to check on my shoulder,” Kylo prompts.

“I didn’t, no. I--” Hux sets down his datapad on the armrest, then inches slightly closer to Kylo to get at the holotank controls. “I wanted to discuss staffing procedures for the mine, as well as top contenders for the governorship.”

“By all means.”

Hux clears his throat, straightens his back, and starts saying something. Kylo isn’t sure what. 

Hux is gorgeous in profile, and Kylo’s enjoying the angle. Even the blue glow of the holotank can’t mute his hair, and he isn’t wearing his gloves. His greatcoat is folded over the back of the couch. He looks so  _ small  _ like this, hunched over his datapad. Full uniform, but no shoulder padding in sight. 

Kylo could just. Just fucking  _ pull him close _ . Wrap around him and shelter him. Warm him up. He could. He could just--

“....Supreme Leader, do you concur?”

Kylo blinks. “On  _ what _ .”

Hux purses his lips, looks like he’s holding back a sigh. “Transferring five hundred political prisoners from Hays Minor to Qusuf IX to staff the mine. It won’t be the full number, but it should be a strong start.”

“As the Hays Minor inmates already have mining experience from their own planet,” Kylo supplies, connecting the dots.

“Exactly.”

“Smart thinking, General.”

For some reason, Hux dips his head at the praise. A smile tugs briefly at the corner of his mouth.

“That _ is _ what you pay me for,” he says, after a moment. 

“Yeah,” Kylo manages. His mouth is dry.

“Yes. Ah.” Hux looks down, crosses and uncrosses his ankles. Clears his throat. “Anyway. After-action reports indicate about eight hundred Qusufians surrendered, and remain in the mine. They’re sequestered in--” He leans across to tap a space in the middle of Level 1. “--this storeroom.”

“And?” 

The odd softness of moments ago dissipates, replaced by the usual peeved veneer. A visor snaps back down, shuttering Hux’s face. 

“And I recommend they remain under close supervision until the first group of new workers arrives, then return to their former positions. With the exception of children in the age range of the trooper program.”

It all sounds reasonably standard. Hux is leaning on that.

“Good.” Kylo stretches again, which tugs at the bacta patch. He winces under the mask. Hux’s eyes follow the movements of his arms. Linger again on the wound. “What about the governorship candidates?”

“Yes.” Hux’s gaze drops to the couch; Kylo follows it. Three centimeters of gray upholstery span between Hux’s bare hand and Kylo’s own, resting on his thigh. Hux says nothing else.

“Yeah?”

In response, Hux leans forward to switch the holotank display. A few taps, and the mine disappears, replaced by the personnel profile of one Colonel Ennis.

“Top choice?” Kylo asks, skimming the data. 

Ennis is currently serving on the  _ Absolution _ , needs a ground posting in order to make brigadier general.

“No particular order,” Hux demurs. “My presenting a pool of candidates at all looks rather biased--I’m not going to rank them, too.”

“Right, but--” Kylo flicks a wrist, the Force rotating to the second page of Ennis’ profile. No picture this time, just a wall of award writeups. “--your opinion matters to me.”

“Does it? Now?” Hux scoffs lightly, which Kylo deserves. “About...gubernatorial candidates?”

_ About everything. About me, and what it would take to prove I want more than-- _

“Yes.” Kylo swallows hard. 

Hux is thinking of all the arguing on the planet’s surface, every time Kylo pulled rank, every time he ignored his assessments, every time it went wrong, no matter how it turned out in the end. He’s thinking of how he pleasured Kylo through it all, and how--

Kylo pulls himself back from reading deeper. Hux doesn’t need an intrusion, too. He clears his throat.

“Yes,” he repeats. “Give me your best.”

Hux cuts him a sideways glance at that, and oh.  _ Doesn’t he always?  _ Unfortunately, he has the poise not not to make the innuendo.

“Ennis,” he begins, “has performed admirably since her first posting on the  _ Supremacy _ . She was put in charge of weapons procurement straight out of the Academy, and that remains her operational specialty. She understands both the importance of dedlanite and the processes required to deliver it efficiently. She is highly--” Hux falters suddenly, glances down.

“What is it?” 

Hux purses his lips for a moment, then looks back up. “I’m sorry, I can’t--I can’t brief you with--” He inhales so deeply his cheeks hollow a bit, then he leans over. Reaches out. “--this--” 

One hand lands on each of the masks’ clasps. A stone drops into the pit of Kylo’s stomach as Hux fidgets with them.

“It hasn’t healed,” he objects, if unsteadily. “Much. It might not, I-- That’s why I’m wearing--.”

Too late. Hux ignores him. The clasps give a hydraulic hiss as they come apart, and fine. If Hux wants to see this, it’s his own set of issues. A glimpse at inevitable victory, maybe. 

Who cares. His face is close to Kylo’s, and Kylo’s so fucking tired of walls. The mask is one. He lifts his hands to cover Hux’s, guiding the mask off.

The burst of cool air feels good. Prickles his raw nerves a bit, but doesn’t cause any pain. Not with Hux right in front of him, not with the mask between Hux’s hands, Hux bent to set it on the floor and out of the way. 

He sits back up; his gaze pores momentarily over Kylo’s face, but betrays none of the disgust of before.

“It’s better,” he offers.

“I know.” Kylo’s throat is tightening, pulse is picking up.

“Much better.”

“Yeah, it--”

Hux doesn’t let him finish. Doesn’t even let him close his mouth before leaning over and pressing his lips against Kylo’s, warm and wet and seeking.

It takes a moment to register, for Kylo to close his eyes and even begin to respond. He doesn’t do this-- _ they don’t  _ do this--and Hux tastes like stale tea, which is actually fucking incredible, and the tip of his nose brushes Kylo’s skin. 

His mouth is as soft as it’s always looked, but his teeth counteract it. He’s nipping at Kylo’s lower lip, and one of his hands cups Kylo’s cheek, while the other has slipped to the back of Kylo’s neck. It’s messy and rough and breathless, but it’s good. It’s so good, everything Kylo’s wanted, everything except--

Hux pulls back abruptly, after nothing like long enough, dropping both hands. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate.”

“Hux, we--”

_ Do worse, all the time. _

Hux cuts him off. “I know that isn’t what you--” His hand goes for Kylo’s crotch, like he thinks a perfunctory handjob could somehow be better than--

Kylo leans forward again, crushes his lips against Hux’s, wraps an arm around him to rest at the small of his back. A soft, almost surprised noise escapes Hux’s throat, but then he settles into it, ravenous. Kylo’s other hand cups his cheek, thumb resting on the end of his sideburn. Hux’s hands creep back up, one tangling into Kylo’s hair, tugging in a way that sends chills down Kylo’s spine.

It’s good, he’s good, he’s perfect, and Kylo needs--

_ More. _

He runs his tongue along the seam of Hux’s lips, and they part easily, with another delicate smothered sound in the back of Hux’s throat. Kylo traces the inside of his mouth, his palate, his teeth, his tongue moving against Kylo’s.

Kylo doesn’t stop until he can’t breathe anymore, pulls back long enough to inhale, but not far. Hux’s nose brushes the tip of Kylo’s, and his pupils are blown wide, all but eclipsing the green of his irises. He’s beautiful, but kisses Kylo again before he can say so.

He’s sucking at Kylo’s lower lip, pulling at Kylo’s hair, keeps making these low keening sounds whenever Kylo nips at him. Kylo wants to kiss him until he bleeds, until they’re both bleeding, bleeding into each other’s mouths, until you can’t tell whose blood is whose. He wants Hux to eat him alive just so he can be inside him. 

The Force swirls around him, no Light or Dark, just passion and need, do with it what he wants. 

And how he wants.

Just this, for the rest of time. Hux in his arms, his mouth, his bloodstream until the Dark takes him, until he crumbles. He wants--

Hux pulls back, breathing hot against Kylo’s skin. “I think--” He pauses to inhale. “This might be more comfortable in the other room.”

The bedroom.

Hux’s pupils are massive, and a glance down shows his jodhpurs have tented.

_ Let’s just get off,  _ he’s saying.  _ Let’s get this over with. _

Right.

Kylo’s in no position to demand more.

“Sure.” He draws back, straightens. “Sure, of course.”

#

Within minutes, Kylo’s stripped to the skin and sprawled across his mattress. Hux is on top of him, sweat-slick and disheveled, one elbow by Kylo’s head, erection jutting into Kylo’s stomach. Kylo arches up into him as he dips his head for another breathless kiss.

His lips are swollen between Kylo’s own, wet with both their saliva. The tea flavor lingers on his breath, even after so much time mingling with Kylo’s. It shouldn’t be a turn-on, but it’s so  _ Hux  _ that it’s making Kylo hard, an immutable reminder that this is  _ real.  _

That Armitage Hux, workaholic Hux, who stayed up all night buzzed on Tarine tea, drafting a briefing he didn’t even finish giving, is really on top of him. Is really kissing him like a man starved.

Kylo has one hand in his hair, slowly teasing it out of formation, the other low on his back, massaging lightly. He periodically makes those gorgeous little whining noises, and the only thing keeping Kylo off the edge is the fact that he doesn’t want this to be over.

Hux pulls back, though, panting, as he has to far too often. Catching his breath or some shit. Kylo has breath to spare, or at least can pretend so. He chases his lips. 

But Hux places a hand on his chest, holding him back, though their foreheads still nearly touch.

“Just--” Hux gasps, shutting his eyes for a moment before he can finish. “--let me know when.”

“When what?” Kylo’s own voice emerges low, hoarse.

“When you want my cock.”

“Oh.”

Right. 

Hux’s hand drifts below Kylo’s waist; he thumbs the underside of Kylo’s cock, up to its crown. He’s hard too, apparently. “You just feel ready.”

Kylo’s breath hitches, teeth catch on his lower lip. It feels fucking amazing. He could come, but-- “Not yet.”

“All right.” Hux’s hand resurfaces, thumb shining with precome. He raises it to his own lips, meets Kylo’s eyes, and licks it clean. 

“ _ Fuck _ .”

“Is that a  _ now _ ?”

“No,” Kylo says, too quickly. He presses up toward Hux again, breathes against his lips, “I said not yet.”

“Very well.” Hux leans down again, catches Kylo’s mouth in his own. 

There’s a new urgency in his kissing, though, and he’s grinding harder, his cock rubbing on and off of Kylo’s. He’s all but rutting against him, and  _ oh. _

He wants to come. He wants to be done, wants this to be over, and for all Kylo could stay like this forever, he owes Hux this much. Freedom, if he wants it. 

_ (Someone still matters to you) _

The hand on Hux’s back drifts down his spine.

_ (It saved your life. Kept you from going under.) _

Kylo  _ owes--  _

He shuts his eyes tighter. He has no idea what he’s doing, just that he has to, just that he  _ owes _ , and more than that, more than anything, that he  _ wants. _

His hand slips lower, over the curve of Hux’s ass. His breath catches in his throat mid-kiss, but he doesn’t stop. Extends one finger. Traces it down Hux’s cleft, pushing between lightly, experimentally.

Hux gasps a strangled sound into Kylo’s mouth, immediately pulls back. 

_ Shit. _

Kylo’s all but babbling. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I shouldn’t-- I know you don’t--”

“No.” Hux’s voice has dropped an octave, sounds almost hushed. “No, it-- It’s fine. It’s--” He stops, purses his lips, swallows. When he starts speaking again, his throat sounds tight. “It’s fine. I just-- You don’t want that.”

Hux brushes a fallen lock of hair out of his eyes. He’s so beautiful it hurts to look at him, so bright in the Force it almost burns. 

Kylo swallows, holds his gaze. “I want that. I want--” He doesn’t have the words for this. He isn’t asking to get on top of Hux, wouldn’t ask for that kind of trust, that kind of capacity to cause pain. “I want to touch you. Inside you. I--”

_ You, I want you, can’t you see-- _

“But can you get off on…” Hux trails off, speaks carefully, as if clarifying what’s on offer. “...your fingers up my arse?”

Kylo doesn’t hesitate. “Fuck yes.”

_ Please. _

Hux wets his lips, lowers his gaze. Runs one finger up and down Kylo’s bacta patch.

_ You can trust me. _

_ I’ve got you. _

He’s rock-hard, sat up far enough now that he’s straddling Kylo. His pupils are wide, dark as quintessence. His chest is heaving. The corner of his mouth twitches upward.

“Okay,” he says. “I’d-- I’d like that.”

He slings his right leg across Kylo’s body, climbing off of him. Kylo rolls over, pinning him down as he spreads his legs. He looks stunning, loosened hair fanning across the pillowcase. The lube rests beside it, where he set it earlier.

Kylo’s heart is in his throat, but he reaches for the bottle with unsteady hands. His hands are better, too--no prominent veins, fingers thick, skin healthy, pinkish. Kylo has disposable gloves in the fresher medpac, but Hux isn’t asking for them. 

“Okay,” Kylo breathes, then uncaps the lube. He squeezes an amount similar to what Hux typically uses onto his index finger. “Tell me if that’s…?”

Hux’s throat bobs as he swallows. “Enough. Perfect.” He wriggles against the pillow again, fully exposing the furl of his hole. 

Kylo almost forgets to breathe. It’s embarrassing--all the sex they’ve had, and this is the first time he’s seen it. He’s thought about it, sure, imagined it in the shower, under his sheets at night, alone. For seven fucking years. 

“Ren? Were you going to--?”

“Yeah.” Kylo closes his eyes, inhales. He’s so hard it aches. “I just don’t want to--”  _ hurt you  _ “--fuck it up.”

Hux snorts. “Do your best.”

“Okay.” Kylo swallows, rests his left hand on Hux’s wiry thigh, strokes up and down with his thumb. “Okay.” He reaches between Hux’s legs with his other hand, then touches his rim with his lubed-up index finger. 

Hux shudders at the contact. Sighs.

“Tell me if--”

“Please keep going.”

_ Okay.  _ Kylo mimics what Hux does for him, traces the perimeter of Hux’s entrance, leaving a sticky trail behind. Once. Twice. Hux has his eyes closed, lips pressed together.

“I’m going in now,” he says, uncertainly.

Hux huffs a tight laugh. “Thank you for the announcement.”

For the sarcasm, Kylo plunges in without further warning, earning a strained gasp in response as he pushes past the ring of muscle into tight heat. 

“Fuck,” Kylo murmurs, sinking to the second knuckle. Hux is so soft inside, his body enveloping Kylo’s finger like it belongs there, like it’s a perfect fit.

Hux’s ribs heave, and his lips part in a sharp exhale. He looks amazing, he feels amazing. His cock is hard against his soft stomach, his balls drawn tight toward his body. 

This isn’t enough for him. He always does more. He always--

Kylo hooks his finger, stretching Hux slightly. The sound he makes is longer, higher, more startled.

“Is that good?” Kylo asks. “You can tell me if it isn’t.”

“It is,” Hux breathes. “Can I have. More.”

“You can have anything you want.” 

Kylo curls and uncurls his index finger, lowering it enough to allow his middle finger entry. Hux shivers with the friction, gasps at Kylo’s second finger. And again as Kylo scissors them, stretching him further. His teeth dig into his lower lip, eyes squeezed shut.

“Relax,” Kylo says, then pushing deeper, “unless you can’t, in which case--”

“Stop saying that.” Hux swallows. “Just. Deeper. Please.”

Precome is leaking onto his stomach, and Kylo wants to bend to lick it off, but he’s got two fingers up Hux’s ass, and his other hand is almost stiff on Hux’s thigh, and he’s got more than enough to deal with. His own cock is wet, too, throbbing.

_ Focus. _

Deeper.

Kylo spreads his fingers again, forcing further upward, and Hux. Screams. It’s high, ear-splitting, almost terrifying; hand flying to his mouth to stifle it.

“Shit, is that--”

“Yes,” Hux pants, voice rough, slurred. “Yes, that’s--”

He doesn’t have to ask. Kylo scissors again, Hux’s hand stays over his mouth, biting down on it to muffle his cry.

“You don’t have to do that,” Kylo murmurs. “Go on.” He drags out the motion this time, fingers moving back together as slowly as he can. “Let it out. Scream for me, baby.” He spreads his fingers quickly, without warning, clearly striking Hux’s prostate.

Hux does as Kylo said, fingers going limp over his mouth. The cry is short, but the air vibrates with it, or the Force does, or something. His hips buck upward, as if involuntarily. He looks wrecked, stomach slick, hair beyond fixing, sweat plastering wisps to his forehead.

Kylo’s breath hitches. “More?”

Hux just nods, throat bobbing.

“Ask me.”

Kylo needs to hear it. 

“Ren--”

Kylo moves his fingers vertically in response. Hits Hux’s prostate again, hard. Hard enough that his pleasure bleeds into the air, saturating Kylo’s senses, singing through his bloodstream. It feels amazing--  _ Hux  _ is feeling amazing. 

Because of Kylo.

(Holy shit.)

Kylo pictures the pleasure as he lines up a third finger, imagines it curling in his hand, a white sphere of light. He presses the three fingers in at once, pushes the pleasure behind them, Hux’s own sensations looping back through him. 

“ _ Kylo.”  _

Hux’s hips thrash upward, and his orgasm crests with a force that nearly knocks Kylo over on top of him, but he has enough presence of mind to fuck him through it, rapt as Hux’s release stripes his stomach, his ribs, his flushed and shuddering chest.

He seems to come forever. It’s the hottest thing Kylo’s ever seen, Hux falling apart for him, vulnerable, writhing.  _ Trusting.  _ His own cock pulses, but he doesn’t withdraw his hand until Hux has finished, cock softening against his hip.

“Fuck,” Hux breathes, opening his eyes. They’re shining, wet with. Holy fuck, with tears. He brings up a hand to brush them back, blinking rapidly. “Ren, that was…” He trails off, gaze trailing to Kylo’s own erection. “What about you?”

“I’ll--” Kylo belatedly pries his left hand off of Hux’s thigh. A bruise is left behind. Fuck. “I’ll take care of it. This was. For you.”

“So do it here.”

“What?”

Hux’s mouth twitches. “...Take care of yourself here? You can--” He shifts his shoulders against the pillow. “Come on my chest.”

“You want that?”

But Kylo’s lubed-up right hand is already straying toward his cock. 

“What’s a little more mess?”

Kylo bites his lip. “Okay.”

He takes himself in hand, strokes once, base to tip, simple, slow. Familiar. 

Fuck, he’s close.

It takes two strokes to bring him off, his orgasm exploding white behind his eyes. 

Somewhere in the afterglow, Hux’s legs drop, and Kylo topples onto him and into the stickiness on his chest.

They’re nose to nose, hot come smeared between them. Kylo leans in, or Hux arches up, or both. Their lips press together, anyway, brief and chaste, before Kylo rolls over beside him.

Lies here. Breathing.

#

“Does this hurt?”

The come is drying, going tacky on Kylo’s stomach, but he can’t bring himself to care. He hasn’t moved, but Hux has turned onto his side, is tracing the remains of the decay on Kylo’s cheek with a delicate finger. It tingles, but isn’t painful.

“Would you stop if I said yes?” Kylo returns.

“No.”

Kylo knows. The worst part is that he’d let him, even if it did hurt. He’d need that, too. Still needs anything Hux will give him.

Hux is quiet, still touching him with one finger, the other hand propping his head up on the pillow.

“It truly is horrible,” he says, after a moment.

Kylo turns his head to face him, stopping his finger as he drops it. “I’m aware.”

Hux’s lips thin, tongue running over his teeth in that way he does when he’s holding in a laugh. There’s no happiness in his presence, though, just a sense of quiet, serenity. Like sorrow, somehow.

Hux looks down; Kylo follows his gaze to their hands, tangled amid the damp sheets, a centimeter apart. Kylo closes it, just barely. Moves his little finger to rest on Hux’s knuckle. Neither of them look up.

“Is there a…” Hux trails off, inhales through his nose. “A prognosis?”

Of course he’s asking that. 

“It’s unpredictable,” Kylo says. “Varies by person. So I can’t give you a succession date.”

“I’m not asking  _ when.  _ I’m…” Hux stops entirely, slips his hand out from under Kylo’s finger. That’s fine. Kylo doesn’t need--

“You want to know how.” Kylo buries his fingers in the flatsheet again, twisting it tight. “What signs to watch for, at least. When to start preparing your--.”

“Fuck, Ren. No.” Hux’s voice pitches upward, and his hand moves quickly, stilling Kylo’s covering it. His thumb traces along Kylo’s knuckles, deceptively tender. “I just would like to know if I’m going to be--”

“Stuck with the dying man.”

“No, not--”

Kylo’s eyes prickle; he swallows back the knot in his throat. “I don’t mind. That’s-- That’s completely reasonable to ask. I just… don’t know what to tell you.”

He has no fucking clue. That sometimes it’s paralysis, every bone in the body shattering, healing again crooked; that sometimes it’s total rot, sometimes fading, sometimes like a cancer?

That Hux himself--this closeness--was the only thing keeping it at bay the past two weeks? He shouldn’t have to bear that. Deserves better than to carry it.

Hux strokes his hand, speaks softly. “Why not?”

“Like I told you,” Kylo says, hoarsely. “It varies.” A tear leaks out, and he reaches to stop it in its tracks, brush it aside. 

“Okay,” Hux murmurs, sniffs another inhale. “Okay.” His hand stills, but he doesn’t let go.

They lay in silence for another minute, Kylo tipping his head back against the tears, until Hux clears his throat.

“Can I use your sonic?”

“Yeah,” Kylo answers, thickly. “Have at it.”

Hux lifts his hand first--Kylo’s feels cold without it. Then he swings his legs over the side of the mattress, stands, and crosses toward the doorway. He bends at the waist and scoops up his uniform. 

Of course he does. He has to leave. He has to make himself presentable, has to leave for alpha shift on the bridge. He’s already running late--this entire stop has been mere obligation, the Supreme Leader bludgeoning his way to the top of his schedule.

He heads into the fresher without looking back.

#

Kylo has no right to expect any more than this. He knows this. The next years of his life will be like this--however many he has left: sex when he can get it, one-sided affection the last trace of Light in him. 

There’s no hope of a feedback loop: Hux giving him something that can permanently sustain him. The occasional orgasm might be enough. Might still help. That’s all he can hope for, and he should stop asking. Stop obligating. That will only sour it the faster.

The sonic whistles on the other side of the wall, and Kylo tosses, turns back to face the fresher door. 

He knows what’s coming. What he is. 

(Yet he can feel the ghost of Hux’s fingers on his, like a phantom limb.)

(Yet his lips are swollen where Hux abused them.)

(Yet Hux shut his eyes and asked for what he wanted.)

What he wanted was Kylo’s fingers inside him, Kylo’s spend across his chest. 

The burst of pleasure he broadcast was strong enough for Kylo to latch onto, send back to him.

But.

It’s Hux.

It’s got to be a high, the most powerful being in the galaxy wholly focused on you, on making you  _ feel good.  _ Kylo knows what it’s like.

(The motherfucking  _ Starkiller  _ hesitant, tender:  _ “What do you need?” _ )

The sonic squeaks off.

Kylo forces his eyes shut, trying to focus on the post-coital heaviness of his limbs. To drift off, before he has to watch Hux leave.

#

The whir of the fresher doors, however, stirs him back to awareness. 

Kylo blinks awake against his will, Hux a black and white blur along the side of the bed.

Too much white. His arms and legs are bare, clad only in shirtsleeves and briefs. 

“Your uniform should be clean,” Kylo says, more slurry than he means.

Hux turns toward him, reddening for some reason. “It is, I just, ah-- Forgot my belt and socks.” His gaze darts up and down, and  _ shit _ \-- The shadows under his eyes are dark and veiny, the whites bloodshot. He keeps talking, like he can’t stop. “Easy to do, after-- well. That experience.”

Kylo bites his lip. Considers.  _ What the hell _ . Goes for it.

“Better than the last handjob, I hope.” Kylo shuffles up a bit, props himself up on his elbows. “Or at least actually classified as sex.”

Hux smirks at his feet. “I’d say so. Though the handjob wasn’t bad.”

“You’re allowed to say it was shit.”

“I know.” Hux purses his lips, makes no move toward his neglected articles of clothing. “And I’m not. But perhaps--” He tilts his head to one side. “Perhaps we could try a reprise sometime?”

Kylo schools his features to neutrality. “Any time.”

“Good.” Hux nods, makes some move to look around his feet again, but doesn’t bend. The window is still open.

“You could stay.” It’s out before Kylo realizes it.

Hux’s head pivots upward. “You could have asked for the second round before I showered. If you were going to be offering handjobs.”

“No, I--” Hux doesn’t get it. He has to get it. Kylo bites his lip, keeps going. “I don’t want that, I’m not… You’re exhausted. You could stay. Without it.”

It tumbles out of his mouth like a blaster misfiring, wild and disorderly.

Hux is silent in the aftermath, hands clasped behind his back at first, then falling. Squirming at his sides. 

He’s going to say no. Say fuck off.  _ I’ve got work, and so do you. _

But a smile is creeping across his face--no teeth in it, just the slightest curve, but a smile still.

“Well,” he says, and stoops. Picks up his belt, but lays it across the chair behind him. “It  _ is  _ a long way to the bridge.”

Something unfurls in Kylo’s chest; he exhales, relief rushing through him like a stim. He manages to roll over. 

His chest is still tacky with come; the sheets reek of sex. It must not bother Hux. Or at least he must be more tired than he looks.

He sinks onto the bed, pulls his legs up after him, and turns over. He’s curled into himself, facing Kylo, hair loose across his forehead. The sonic took all the product out of his hair. It looks even softer. 

A part of Kylo hardly dares disturb it, but he can’t quite stop himself. He reaches across the narrow space between them and brushes a lock of it behind Hux’s ear. Hux lets him.

“You don’t mind?” Kylo asks, low.

(His hand right now, his scabbed face, and his slow demise.)

(All the shit Hux never signed up for.)

Instead of answering, Hux leans into Kylo’s touch, eyelids fluttering briefly shut.

“Lights,” he murmurs, just loud enough, “zero percent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and come say hey on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/imperialhuxness)!


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